5 Keys to Unlock Read-Aloud Success
Why Read Aloud? When I first taught kindergarten, I read aloud The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The kids in my class loved it and we spent hours discussing caterpillars, eating habits, stories, and Eric Carle. Luckily for me, the third-grade teacher down the hall, probably tired of hearing me read the book aloud again and again,…
Read More
5 Keys to Visual Literacy
When we develop digital solutions at Victory, we want the end user to experience visuals as intuitively as possible. Because space is always at a premium, visuals and text are equally important. The visuals need to immediately convey information and tell an extended story. When used well, they not only save space on the page (a…
Read More
5 Keys to Assessment Literacy
At Victory, we have been developing many kinds of assessments. Whether the assessment is high-stakes summative testing, a performance-based task, or formative student self-assessment, assessment has a huge impact on classroom instruction. This means assessment literacy is a critical tool for teachers as they develop curriculum and apply classroom strategies. What Is Assessment Literacy? What does…
Read More
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 More
A 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 More
Victory’s Vendor and Partnership Processes
In our recent blog post, Instructional Design 101, we provided an overview of several popular instructional design models. One of these, the original ADDIE model, was a linear approach with some iterative features. It evolved to be more cyclical, and spawned many other models. In similar fashion, our linear workflows at Victory have evolved to…
Read More
metacog 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 More
Instructional 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 More
Professional Translation and How To Avoid Flying Naked
Why is it important to have a professional write and translate your product? In this era of new technology and immediacy, it is easy to get carried away with the specialized tools available to get the work done. But remember, they are only tools, which means they are only as good and effective as the…
Read More