What's New!
Solo 6 Literacy Suite
The SOLO 6 project SET-BC initiated with 12 schools last January is facilitating amazing student outcomes. In an effort to expand on the success of this project SETBC’s Provincial Software Acquisition Plan is pleased to be able to offer unlimited school site licenses of Solo Literacy Suite for less than half the list cost until Dec. 31st , 2013. With an unlimited site license you can install the software on every computer in your school and it includes take home rights for students and teachers.
For more information, go to "Supporting Student Success with SOLO 6: A New SET-BC School Support Project"
Teacher quotes from the SOLO project highlight the impact on student achievement that this application is facilitating. The school blog posts for the project highlight the many student success stories sprouting from the project. http://setbcsolo6.setbc.org/blogs/
For example:
From Kristin - resource teacher at A.J. McLellan School Coquitlam
“Three times this week I grabbed someone to show them what my students are doing with SOLO 6! I was so proud of what my students could accomplish. It provided some basic structures for researching, and then writing that really helped them complete their writing tasks.”
From Debbie - teacher at Coal Tyee
“They accessed the Halloween word bank on Co-Writer. This was the first time this group of students had been introduced to SOLO and they navigated it with ease. I was able to join the group when they were in the computer lab as it was my block to support that class. Serendipity was definitely on our side today. It was amazing to see how focused ALL the students were and the amount of writing they had managed to complete during that 30 minute block.”
From Owen Stemler - teacher at Cambridge Elementary
“…the students must have been interested in using Draft Builder, because they got right on the program and were quite successful in using it. After the construction of their outlines the students were quite pleased with the option of having their outlines present on the same screen while writing. Today’s experience showed more that Draft Builder is both a practical and user-friendly writing tool.”
What is SOLO 6?
Don Johnston’s SOLO 6 is a fully featured literacy support suite that includes an easy to use text reader (Read:OutLoud), graphic organizer (Draft:Builder), talking word processor (Write:OutLoud) and word prediction program (Co:Writer). You may be familiar with the original version of SOLO – SOLO 6 has been significantly redesigned, retaining the powerful support and structure for students who struggle with reading and writing, but now with an easy to use interface that both teachers and students will find intuitive.
Read:OutLoud 6 provides high quality text reading of a wide variety of e-text formats including .pdfs and web pages.
Draft:Builder 6 provides strong structure through the three stages of drafting: outlining, note-taking, and draft writing.
Write:OutLoud 6 provides a very simple word processing and text-to-speech interface for polishing writing assignments.
Co:Writer 6 provides spelling and grammar support for struggling writers in all phases of the writing process.
The SOLO 6 interface brings all programs of the literacy suite together and provides teachers with the ability to create, organize, track multiple students’ reading and writing assignments. If you haven’t seen SOLO before or are interested in seeing what’s new, check out the Don Johnston short demo videos or attend a live webinar here: http://www.donjohnston.com/products/solo/index.html