Introducing SOLO™ Part 3

Mary Jo Barry
Mjbarry@donjohnston.com

Motivated to share information--students make new learning understandable to others

Although students often resist the revision and editing stages of writing, students must be convinced that these two steps are often the most critical steps in completing an acceptable, understandable piece of prose for their readers. When students do attempt to revise and edit, they frequently try to do too many steps at once or get sidetracked by mechanics and miss revision altogether. SOLO provides explicit tools to support students as they revise, edit and publish their work. First, SOLO's simple, one-click toolbar provides a variety of tools that remind students to apply these important writing strategies. Additionally, SOLO's interactive help utility provides an Editor's Checklist that can be printed out to guide students through these crucial steps.

Students Improve Content and Quality

Natural sounding speech feedback fosters the development of revision and editing skills. As students listen to their writing by way of this non-threatening medium, they're able to self-evaluate voice, word choice and sentence fluency with less frustration. In addition, students can employ Co:Writer's Linguistic Revision capabilities by placing their cursor anywhere within the text. Grammatically correct word choices appear, helping them write more and enrich their writing.

Students Acquire Mechanics and Conventions Skills

SOLO contains considerate scaffolds that not only model proper conventions, but also guide students in applying them. These considerate supports target the mechanical issues that keep students from being able to express how they feel and what they know through writing.

Educators Oversee Development, Monitor Progress and Target Skill Deficits

Teacher Central helps educators provide a customized learning environment and differentiated instruction by enabling them to :

The Student Progress area in Teacher Central provides a lot of the data educators need as they assess student performance and preparedness of the areas tied to standardized/high-stakes testing. Data, such as word count, sentence length, number of sentences, sequential words and non-high frequency words, is presented in printable graph or data formats to include in student portfolios. Educators can analyze a single piece of writing or compare several writing samples over time.

© 2005 ConnSENSE Bulletin