What are your colleagues exploring? From instructional design to visual literacy to interactive lessons, here’s one way to find out: the top ten Victory blogs from 2016.
This year we had 6,187 unique visitors to our blog, and more than 2,100 of you kept coming back. Our top blog had 432 unique page-views, and it kept people interested for an average of 5 minutes. Yet we know we can do even better this year! Help us deliver educational insights that are important to you: request a Victory blog topic for 2017.
Top 10 Victory Blog Posts in 2016
1. Instructional Design 101
In educational publishing, design often refers to graphic design—envisioning and creating the visual look and feel of a book or product. However, graphic design is just one small part of another field of design essential to creating educational materials—instructional design.
2. Design: The Secret Behind Effective Digital Learning Experiences—Part 2
Imagine being able to see evidence of students’ analysis, the kinds of suppositions they make, and when and how they change their minds even before they write about it. Picture literally watching how their prior investigations influence their subsequent decisions. What if we could recognize not only students’ conclusions, but how their close reading of a text (or struggles with it) shapes their entire decision-making process?
3. U.S. Education Market Snapshot: English Language Learners (ELLs)
Overall, the number of ELL students in U.S. public schools is increasing steadily. According to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), ELLs are the fastest growing segment of the student population. Growth in grades 7–12 is the highest and now comprises 10.5% of the nation’s K–12 enrollment. The number of ELL students in elementary grades is also increasing.
4. Skate 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. This task was developed for middle grades and for these learning goals.
5. 5 Keys to Visual Literacy
Visual literacy is about communication. Viewers, like readers, are not simply given the meaning; they actively construct it, as they must for infographics that combine words and visuals. Children are naturally drawn to making and consuming images, but only with practice will they develop visual literacy skills.
6. So You Want to Make an e-Book
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 conversion (How long will it take? How much will it cost?)
7. 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 keep up with rapid changes in our industry.
8. A Revolutionary Interactive Lesson
There are hundreds of lessons that have already been written for the Boston Massacre. Why develop a new lesson? For one thing, new technology enables engaging new types of interactions that were not possible just a few years ago. Yet, we don’t want to develop a lesson just for the sake of new technology. That’s where the standards come in. They give purpose and direction to all the cool things we can do, to make sure they are the things we want to do, things we really need to do.
9. 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 person who uses them.
10. Talking to the Test: Translation or Transadaptation?
There’s a reason why people use the phrase “lost in translation.” Often, there’s more than one path to achieve a good translation, and rarely is the path a straight one. As translators, we have to navigate carefully so we don’t lose our way.
