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Introducing SOLO™ Part 2*

Mary Jo Barry
Don Johnston, Inc.
mjbarry@donjohnston.com

Guided to be active thinkers--students take new ideas, concepts and topic knowledge and make them their own
Connecting reading and writing is the key to assessing a student's understanding of a topic. Students who struggle with writing find it difficult to express new knowledge and ideas through writing because of poor organizational skills, spelling, sentence construction and limited vocabulary. These common barriers are removed in SOLO's supportive writing environment because:

Students Build Process-Writing and Cement Conventions Skills
SOLO's writing environment breaks down the writing process into small, manageable chunks. Three distinct skill areas model the logical, progressive steps students need to be able to express themselves effectively through writing:

• Planning and concept mapping
• Note-taking and resource-citing
• Composing a first draft

As students take ideas and new learning from their reading and make them their own by writing about them, SOLO supports them further by employing its trademark linguistic word prediction-Co:Writer. Students overcome poor spelling and limited written vocabulary with the most advanced type of prediction available.

• Presents grammatically correct word choices
• Provides FlexSpell for poor and phonetic spellers
• Capitalizes and punctuates sentences automatically

Students Expand Written Vocabulary and Participate in Grade-level Curriculum Across Content-Areas
Content-rich Outline Templates and Topic Dictionaries support students as they write in any subject or genre. Topic Dictionaries, auto-generated from any eText read within SOLO's text-reader, are activated and ready to go as students begin to write. Supportive outlines, questions that guide students to include appropriate information, sentence starters and a topic specific eWord Bank gets even the most reluctant writers engaged and successful in the writing process. Templates included contain Written for Success(tm) considerate text to scaffold struggling readers as they are writing. Hundreds of Topic and Genre Dictionaries provide students the topic and content-specific words they need to write what they know. As a result, students participate in writing across the curriculum.

A "No-Fail" Environment for Educators and Students Results in Differentiated Assignments and Differentiated Instruction
In Teacher Central, educators can quickly customize all multi-sensory supports-auditory feedback settings, font size and color-to address each students' individual learning needs and UDL requirements. Educators can quickly create outline templates at varying levels and assign them to multiple students simultaneously. Teacher Central gives educators the ability to oversee every aspect of their students' writing abilities-quick and easy adaptation of the content and the tool, NOT the student. Additionally, Co:Writer provides the Set-up Wizard-a comprehensive, yet FAST way to tailor Co:Writer to meet the specific needs of every learner.

We have explored the benefits of using SOLO's text-reader, the place students begin to comprehend and collect the information that moves with them into their writing and graphical organizer. Join us next month as we investigate how students are supported as they move into revising, editing and publishing their written work! For more information regarding SOLO go to http://donjohnston.com/catalog/solofpfrm.htm.

*This article first appeared in the December Leader Link from Don Johnston, Inc.