Pounding Down the Home Stretch – Update on DRP – May 22, 2020

This has been another productive week by Andrew Gilchrist, Michael Summers and the Nesda team.

Here’s what our progress looks like. The Maloney Method Digital Reading Program has several main pieces. The first piece is the behavior management section that allows instructors to award points to students for good effort. That segment is now complete. The records are kept automatically.

The next segment constitutes the performance measures to determining how much more the student has learned. That segment is also complete. The scores are input by the instructor for sounds learned, words learned and stories read after each session.

         The third huge chunk is the instructor management system for entering and keeping tabs on each and every student as that student passes through the program. That system is also now up and running.

       The final major chunk are the 60 videotaped lessons, by far the largest component. These are the 60 presentations the student will learn to become a competent reader. At the moment, Andrew has vetted and has 15 lessons ready to load into the shell. This is exacting, tedious attention to detail. Once it is finished, we will have a completed product to test. Other than coaching Andrew, Michael Summers and the Nesda team have completed their work. 

           This has turned out to be a much greater challenge that we anticipated given the way in which the world suddenly changed with the global pandemic.  A huge portion of our success goes to Andrew, Michael Summers and the Nesda team for finding ways around the barriers we encountered. My sincere congratulations to them, their ingenuity and their persistence.

           Meanwhile Wilf Wilkinson and Sharon McConnell have successfully impacted Rotary International. Information will be imparted at many levels within Rotary as a result of our tapping into Rotary’s Social Networks on the web. This has enormous capacity to help huge numbers of children.

          My good friend, Mark Bishop, has joined the team as the Sales and Marketing Manager. His many years of expeience in advertising and marketing will be invaluable as we move forward. Mark also has a working knowledge of the instructional systems involved in the program which is an added bonus for our team.

           It would be great if we could announce a launch date for the program, but we have consistently abided by our mantra that it will be ready when it works flawlessly. We will not knowingly release a product that has bugs and glitches. We will release it when we feel confident that parents, teachers and therapists can use it easily and with benefit to their children.

             I do expect that we can start beta test the beginning lessons of the system in the next few days. We will keep you posted as to progress.  Thanks for hanging in. We needed that.

Michael