CEP 812 PART A - Description of Need or Opportunity

   The educational need in my classroom is a lack of literacy skills. There is a small group of students just in my class that students that severely struggle with reading and if they cannot read the directions to the test, assignment, or understand the vocabulary definitions they cannot pass the assessment. This would not be a true assessment of their mathematical knowledge, but rather of their literacy knowledge. 95% of our students are Hispanic and although most of our students are bilingual there is still a significant portion that are ELL. I often have to sit with students during test time to read the test to them or we have to push in our resource teachers from other classrooms to help administer these assessments. This takes time and management away from the rest of the class. In order for these students to be involved in a true assessment of the mathematical standards they are to be tested on, I will be implementing Solo 6 in our school to assist them in doing so.
    This program would not only solve issues in my classroom, but in other subject ares including science and social studies. For example, students may not be able to read the multiple choice question and therefore put a wrong answer for the characteristic of a cell. In addition to helping students read, it helps students struggling with writing. It can be used for certain written informal and formal assignments. In my classroom, I will be using it on our vocabulary assessments on our unit on Coordinate Planes. I will have them take a test on their own without the program, then I will test them using Solo 6 and analyze the results. I will input the questions and answer box into the computer ahead of time and will allow the students to sit at the back table where they would each have their own computer and headphones to listen to and complete the quiz. This tool will continue to be used whenever paper assessments are given where directions are to be read as well.
    The license includes a text reader, graphic organizer, talking word processor, and word prediction. For my purpose, I will be focusing on using the text reader. The cost for unlimited classroom licensing for a self-contained or resource room would be $1299 per classroom. This also includes free Take-Home Rights for students who regularly have class in that room. This is a small price to pay for a lifetime of knowledge and learning.
   The program has been proven to be effective based on research. Schools in Spotswood New Jersey have taken advantage of Solo to assist in their implementation of the Response to Intervention program. They based their need of technology on a cost-effective program that would accommodate and accelerate students learning. Their objective for middle school was to increase proficiency scores by .5 and by the following year they had increased by .77. The program was originally applied in resource rooms for special education students, then was expanded to all students both general and special education to provide all students with the opportunity to reach their maximum learning potential.
    We also do graded testing through Scantron, which will provide a means for data comparison for my students. However, we only have one more Scantron testing at the end of the year. At that time, I will use the data to compare with their testing from the middle of the year.

Resources:
http://www.donjohnston.com/resources/solo6_resources.html
Research:
http://www.donjohnston.com/products/read_outloud/research.html