PictoWriting. Make sure they grow up with both languages!

PictoWriting is an online learning methodology using the potential of images to integrate creativity and visual thinking in literacy development. 

The Problem

With traditional teaching methods, literacy skills stagnate dangerously roughly halfway through the primary school years. Writing, a competence that is key to learn, obtains the poorest results in all Western countries. In the States, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008) 2 thirds of students ended Primary school with a basic to low level in writing.

What is happening? Children grow up surrounded by images, which in turn impacts the way they learn, but still learning methodologies are monomodal, mainly centred in verbal language. Maybe that’s why both school failure and learning difficulties or disabilities are ever increasing.

VoxPrima has developed an easy to scale solution

VoxPrima is a Spanish company that has pioneered the teaching of language and writing through PictoWriting, a methodology that uses the potential of images to integrate creativity and visual thinking in the development of the key skills of reading and writing.

PictoWriting is an innovative, inclusive, personalized teaching method that covers the entire language curriculum at primary school (ages 6 to 11).

The Project has been developed in the context of Spain’s public school system, in a joint effort with writers, illustrators, linguists and performing arts professionals.

The impact of PictoWriting on students has been successfully assessed by Professor A.Llaurado (University of Barcelona) and its results have been assessed and confirmed by the Department of Education in Catalonia. Results show that PictuWriting is a powerful methodology to teach literacy in school classrooms. Its multimodality benefits children in 2 different ways:

• More children improve their writing skills across genres and their skills develop faster and to higher rates.
• PictuWriters made better progress in reading comprehension than their control peers.
  • Attend the diversity of learning stiles present in a classroom.
  • Compensate inequality even if home environment is somewhat deprived of literacy supportive activities such as bedtime or joint story reading …

Currently, the GRETEL Group (UAB) is carrying another 2-year assessment.

After its initial conception, the method has been incorporated in an online platform that is easily scalable and exportable with a reasonable investment.

Over 5,000 students already use the platform this year.

A scalable educational innovation delivering high social impact

Roser Ballesteros founded VoxPrima 7 years ago because she felt people were getting used to school failure. And she kept thinking, “ School is compulsory. We are forcing 1 of every 4 children to fail, to spend 6 precious years of their life believing they cannot”.  Being herself mother of a dyslexic child, she became conscious about the unnecessary, high emotional price lots of children pay for literacy acquisition. 

The main contribution of the PictoWriting method is to make sure that all children have the same opportunities to learn. It’s an effective tool to fight school failure:

The social impact of the methodology is at the core of our business, which seeks to have a global transformative impact on education with a sustainable business model.

PictoWriting is an online learning methodology that combines reading, creating, drawing, and writing, placing the student at the center of the learning process.

PictoWriting uses visual thinking strategies to teach writing, connecting 2 languages (visual and verbal) that only school keeps splitting.

The online PictoWriting platform offers the child a personalized itinerary based on his or her needs and level, a child-tailored battery of language exercises to train the linguistic skills he or she needs to become a proficient reader and writer.

Technology allows us to:

• Transfer the methodology to the teacher.
• Offer the child personalized learning
• Include children with learning disabilities
• Continued assessment and improvement of the impact of the methodology.
• The platform is generating a valuable linguistic corpus and the company wants to hire a BIG DATA and Machine Learning IT engineer to identify error patterns, learn from the user and improve the personalization. The platform also analyses the key words of the texts produced by pupils, what will allow us to adapt the content to his or her interests in the near future.

Over the next 12 months we want to:

• Apply big data and machine learning to our online platform to improve the personalization of the methodology especially for children with learning difficulties related to writing and reading.   
• Launch a disruptive marketing campaign and increase by 7 the number of users (from 5,000 to 35,000).

We are closing in July a $584,000 financing round. The investment will be applied to sales and marketing team and ongoing platform development for increasing the range of products and the geographical market.

Nevertheless, we are considering the possibility of a 2nd financing round of $2,336,000 in 6 months time, to accelerate the scalability plan.

Our sales strategy is focused in school during the first 2 years and starting 2020 commercializing also an app for family or home schooling use.

Our business model is  SaaS, therefore we will:

• Design a disruptive online marketing strategy.
• Provide centralized online service.

Our 2018 sales strategy focuses in 2 targets:

• PRIVATE GROUPS: Owning a large number of schools that permit a rapid increase of users.
• Districts and Departments of Education: to pilot an promote the methodology specially in challenging schools since PictoWriting has proven to be an effective tool to overcoming school failure.

September 2018, once the campaign is over, we will study the feedback of schools, with special attention to their objections and, for 2019 campaign we will develop a marketing strategy to provoke principals, teachers and families to proactively try and buy the product online. 

During the school year 2018-2019, 5,000 students and 250 teachers from 18 schools used the PictoWriting platform an average of 4 days a week.

Teachers programmed the whole school-year language and literacy curricula with PictoWriting.

PictoWriting helps boost students’ motivation and selfesteem:

• 97.1% of all students love doing PictoWriting.
• It made 42% of them feel special.

91% of the teachers felt better qualified for teaching children to write and acknowledge that PictoWriting led them to raise their expectations on their students.

In 12 months we want to reach 35,000 students using the platform and in 3 years we expect to have over 100,000 users; and the same proportion applies to teachers.

We offer online webinars to train teachers on the platform usability and face-to-face training by creativity and communication experts in case the district contracts a specific training plan for their teachers, on top of the platform subscription. In the next coming months we will complete the online teachers’ training itinerary both with tutorials and online activities.

Technical and methodological assistance service to the teacher is provided online through the platform.

Roser Ballesteros CEO and Product Development Director. Ashoka 2017 Social Entrepreneur.Studied art history, writes and is about to publish her first novel.  Experience in managing positions.

Ana Llauradó, R&D Director. PhD in Linguistics with a focus on writing in primary school education (Harvard, UB, Institute of Education, London).

Frank Perkins, Advisory CTO. Computer engineer specializing in security, big data and AI.

Rául Ferrández, Domestic Market Marketing and Sales Director.15 years’ experience, focused on marketing innovation products in schools.

Anna Preixens, Implementation and Training. Professional screenwriter, studied art and design. High organizational skills.

The current product is addressed to schools. As off 2020 we want to launch a product for families and homeschooling.

Our main objective at this stage is to penetrate the Spanish market and increase the number of users. We want to progressively substitute the conventional textbook, although we know there might be a period of coexistence while the school tries PictoWriting and takes the decision. That’s why we offer to product versions:

• Comprehensive Product: substitutes the textbook.
• Transition Product: progressive methodological change.

Business model: sale of license per student and school year, priced $35.

Solve is a great opportunity for VoxPrima to gain international visibility and have access to key education and IT experts worldwide who can support and participate in the project, and facilitate partnership with MIT researchers as well as World’s leading Big Data and AI players. Solve might also be a great opportunity to speed the scalability of PictoWriting to all areas of low-income settings in USA, and specially Hispanic communities, as well as to promote the use of the methodology in developing countries.

Our main key barriers are:

• Improve the personalization and adaptive learning of the methodology, where a strong high skilled BIG DATA and AI team is needed and partnership with a leading IT company would strengthen the company’s strategy.
• Rapidly scale the number of users to enlarge the linguistic corpus the platform generates itself.
• Visibility and access to strategic partnership.