Saturday, August 23, 2014

SOLE is starting to take off worldwide. Andrew Greig has been in Costa Rica recently meeting with Education Minister Sonia Marta Mora to discuss plans for SOLE and Google to work with the Ministry and teachers to help raise both the education level of students and their standard of living.  The Government of Costa Rica has been very receptive to the discussions and is looking at beginning a pilot project to see how it works. Andrew has been approached by people outside of The Education Ministry who have private schools or other interests similar to ours that want to be a part of what we are doing. Some of the people are related to Nobel Prize winners. He has been constantly blitzed by the media there about our work. Andrew is the founder of Vizzeco, a Google Apps Reseller.

SOLE stands for Self Organized Learning Environments.  The SOLE Vizzeco is promoting is based on the work of Dr. Sugata Mitra. In a SOLE

1.      The students develop a question about a topic or topics of interest to them.
2.      They gather in groups of four around a question.
3.      With one laptop they research their question for forty minutes
4.      They write up their information in paragraph form.
5.      They decide on a presentation style and present their information to the rest of the group.

Vizzeco envisions many spin offs to working through a SOLE. Among the ideas being considered are Vizzeco would like to:

  1. Introduce SOLE in school environments, especially for 10 – 15 year olds. It will work with older students as well. SOLE will improve student reading levels and help maintain a higher standard of work in the class.
  2. Have students participating involved in Google School where the students would learn about all the applications that Google has and be able to help others understand these applications and how they work. 
  3. Have students learn about providing a self-sustaining healthy diet to improve their daily lives.
  4. Encourage students to have the entrepreneurial spirit.


As the project evolves other nations will be brought on board to develop their understanding of SOLE and how their students will benefit from it.

This is indeed an exciting time to be in education.


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