Digital Content Assets for E2 Publish April 2019

Digital Content Assets for Edition 2 Online Curriculum

Managing the Tracker

I managed the Digital Content Assets for the 2nd Edition "publish" of Amplify Education's Middle School ELA online curriculum for School-Year 2019-2020. This task entailed acting as liaison-diplomat to 4 different teams in the journey: educators, CMS content authors, copy editors, and illustrators & designers; quality assurance was key up to and including upload to DAM (Digital Asset Management system).

Coordinated by the head of CMS authoring, this effort could not have been accomplished without my ownership of the above tracker. There were 2-3 new curriculum units (Yellow Fever; The Summer of the Mariposas; The Holocaust); revisions to 12 Existing units, and with a live shifting order of units which created tracking challenges. Two deadlines (1/15/19 & 4/15/19) for CMS authoring—including last-minute asset adjustment and new creation—were met successfully.

Built in g-sheets, the tracker was very hands-on, not automatic, but critical to getting the project done. Hash-number columns (invisible here) stretched to the far right which indicated the asset was "complete". New content assets were cross-referenced in Existing in-lesson assets (sheet 1). Licensed images—a sheet created separately—were cross-referenced in Existing & New Unit tabs to avoid confusion. Rows changed color according to progress (but not in every tab). Sign-off was signaled by initialing and dating by the members of the 4 teams.

Communication among teams was through Slack channels and email. For finals, I took great pains to provide information via email (filenames and links)—not just to make a digital breadcrumb—but to make it crystal clear to the DAM coordinator who was a new-hire to the role; I insisted on total clarity for the critical last step and the easiest and most streamlined process.

Text Assets

I developed and designed text projections—a static text asset projected by the teacher for group instruction. The challenge was to establish a proportion where text was "alive"—as opposed to dead or illegible. This required sensitivity to font size and line spacing for different types of content, but also included a flexible framing device, creating an intuitive focus on the text.

Graphic Assets for data visualization

Teachers use graphics to help students organize content. Below are samples of Middle School ELA graphic assets to encourage organized thinking/writing and space to brainstorm.

Highlighted Text Assets - Essay Writing

Within Amplify's Middle School ELA curriculum, highlighted assets are used to teach the parts of a well-written essay, starting with a basic sentence (Claim/Reason) and building to whole paragraphs. One of the goals for the E2 "publish" deadline was to design these assets to be more accessible. My design task was to explore colors legible for students with the two most common types of color-deficient vision (red-green). Below, I have provided a duplicate version to show how the projection would appear to a reader with red-green color-deficient vision—legible but still set off with distinct highlights.

The same asset to a reader with red-green color-deficient vision:

Visual & Audio-Visual Assets

There were a number of visual and audio-visual assets to be created for Existing and New content units. Here are just a few with annotations.

The Limbic System with Lobes of the Brain and Prefrontal Cortex
Unit 7C

I contributed art direction here. It was most important to indicate the Prefrontal Cortex as part of the Frontal Lobe in one image and in relation to the Limbic System which controls human emotions.