Goals and aims

Since the end of March to early June I ran SOLE in my class everyday. This took up from 2 - 3 periods to research, organize and present their findings. The following is the plan I came up with and the results of it.

Goals

Give students control of their learning

Increase learning engagement

Enhance collaboration among students and teacher

Provide students with modern learning technologies

Allow access to learning tools from almost anywhere

Improve accountability

Reduce paper use

Give critical feedback everyday

Approach

Implement Google Apps for Education

Use SOLE everyday

Teach skills for developing appropriate questions

Teach research techniques (advanced features of Google, evaluating websites for content)

Results

Boosted student enthusiasm about learning

Sparked student and teacher ingenuity and creativity

Enabled students to work from almost anywhere and not always in the same room

Improved access to industry-leading collaboration tools allowed them to perform stronger SOLE research

Students collaboration on projects improved

Helped teacher more easily track homework and assignments

Reading levels of all students in Grade 4 are at Grade 5 – 7 levels

Parents are happier with the wider range of knowledge their children are demonstrating

Parental interaction with student learning has increased

Student engagement in topics and learning is higher for all students

Student social skills improved while major behavioural challenges decreased

Student presentation skills, speaking, body language, answering questions on the spot, taking criticism, improved dramatically

Overall confidence in their abilities increased

I will add to this plan in September so that a whole year of SOLE will be able to demonstrate stronger results.