Ed Tech
5 Keys to Digital Literacy
Recently, we premiered our digital lesson on the Boston Massacre at the ISTE and ILA conferences. The lesson was a big hit. It inspired many discussions with technology coordinators and educators on what makes a lesson good for digital literacy. The table below summarizes what we learned, and the video that follows gives concrete examples…
Read MoreRead MoreA Revolutionary Interactive Lesson
In our last blog on performance tasks, we revealed our instructional design approach to creating a social studies performance task, The Boston Massacre. In this blog, we’ll explain why we expanded the performance task to become an interactive lesson, with embedded performance tasks. So, this is really an evolution, not a revolution. Here is a sneak preview…
Read MoreRead Moremetacog Building Its Deep Learning Analytics Platform with Databricks
Victory’s spinoff metacog was just featured in a blog post by Databricks, a company founded by the team that created Apache Spark, a powerful open-source data processing engine. See the Databricks blog post below. metacog has been hard at work releasing new capabilities of its learning analytics platform, while at the same time enhancing existing…
Read MoreRead MoreInstructional Design 101
Before we plunge into instructional design, let’s step back. What does it mean to design? Here’s the definition, according to Merriam-Webster: Design 1. to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan: devise, contrive 2. a: to conceive and plan out in the mind b: to have as a purpose: intend c: to devise for a…
Read MoreRead MoreDesign: The Secret Behind Effective Digital Learning Experiences–Part 2
In our first blog on this topic, we began to reveal the secret behind the magnetic allure of games, simulations, and other online performance-based digital learning experiences. We showed you a well-aligned, well-designed simulation-based science performance task. In this blog, we’ll show you how the design of a digital performance task directly influences the richness of…
Read MoreRead MoreSo You Want to Make an e-Book
Here are some insights into different formats available for creating e-books—and some issues to consider. When picking an e-book format, you’ll be making trade-offs among these factors: device compatibility (What devices/platforms can customers read it on?) sales compatibility (Where can you sell it?) features (What does it look like? What can it do?) ease/cost of…
Read MoreRead MoreSkate Park Performance Task
We have become proficient at developing performance tasks closely aligned to NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards). Of course, a good performance task aligns to standards across multiple disciplines. The following task was developed for middle grades and for these learning goals. Please watch the video and then try the performance task. We’d love to hear…
Read MoreRead MorePage Composition in the Digital Era
You likely have heard the Riddle of the Sphinx: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus solved the riddle with one word: “Man.” He didn’t interpret the time of day literally, and he knew that a baby crawls on all fours, an adult stands…
Read MoreRead MoreGetting Ready for the Internet of Things (IoT)
What Is the IoT? Watch this video for a quick overview. How Will the IoT Affect the Education Industry? For several years, publishers have been developing “smart” curricula that can adapt to students. Cell phones were once banned in schools, but now they are often seen as a valuable asset. As technology changes, so do our expectations.
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