Doing SOLE solo…

I talked about Sugata Mitra's Hole In The Wall Project a while ago, I really like this way of learning as it is self motivated and child led. He has since set up The School In The Cloud, which really is for children to use the SOLE principles, where 4 kids work together to answer the big question.

We haven't managed to get together with anyone else to do it with yet so Ebi-kun has been doing SOLE solo! I wanted to show you how easy it is to use, I didn't help Ebi-kun at all, just set it up initially then let him loose with it!

You need to set up an account and then you can start a new session…

You can use your own BIG question or one that they suggest, choose how long the session will last, we usually do it for 60 minutes as 30 minutes wasn't long enough. Also put in how many kids and how many in each group - I think this is for when you are teaching a large class.

You have a couple of pages to click through, one has a presentation on how SOLE works but you can skip that the next time round. This is where the kids take over. They have a search engine, one for images and one for video and it uses safe search so hopefully nothing frightful will pop up! The last box is for the presentation.

The children can clip things to their scrapbook as they go along…

They can put the main question into the search box or another question might come along as they are doing their research, this is where it gets interesting because each group will end up looking at different things, depending on the questions that arise as they work through.

This is maybe the difficult bit because some of the articles are written for adults so kids might find the language too difficult. Having a group of mixed aged kids would help I think.

Once they find something they want to use, they can simply highlight the text and C&P it onto the scrapbook..

All the things that they collect are kept in little boxes, this can include images too…

Hover over the image and a little scissors icon appears, click that to add the image to the scrap book.

We found that with some of the more difficult topics, watching videos made it easier than reading articles. Instead of watching the whole thing in one go, watch a small section, stop the video and add a note to the scrap book.

As we did 60 minutes, at the 40 minute mark, research stops and he then puts together his presentation. Simply add each note from the scrapbook to the slide show. This part we need to work on, what makes a good presentation and the order the information needs to be presented in, but he is getting better.

Once everything is done, they can present their findings. This is where you can see how much they have really understood from how they can explain it to you.

As the parent/teacher, you can go in and rate the presentation and then it can be accessed again so they can do the presentation for daddy!

I am itching to do this with a group of kids to see how it works and have considered setting it up virtually but I'm not sure they can all log into the same project at the same time. Maybe I will investigate more in the holidays!

Anyway, we give it the thumbs up, Ebi-kun said it is easier to find stuff that just sitting down with Google - Google is great but can be overwhelming and even with the parental controls set up, you never know what might turn up in a search!

Hole In The Wall Project

A while ago I watched a TED talk by Sugata Mitra about child driven education and the Hole In The Wall Project, if you haven't seen it, you can watch it here..

Mitra then went on to win $1,000,000 from TED to put towards the Hole In The Wall project. He has been testing his theories for over 12 years, thousands of kids have benefited from his project and now he is re-defining the way that children should be taught.

After studying about Montessori's theories and ideas that education should be child led, not teacher led I am 100% behind the need for change. Traditionally a class has, let's say 30 kids, with the teacher dictating what will be studied that day. This is no benefit to anyone but the teacher, bright kids are held back because the whole class must move forward at the same speed, slower kids don't get all the help that they need and the average kids are never pushed to try things just out of their reach.

That, combined with the learning cycles, where kids are drawn to different ares of interest at different times makes the traditional classroom totally inefficient as a learning tool. Children don't need more educated teachers, more tests, longer school days, more homework - unless we are trying to crush the love of learning out of them, what they need is to be allowed to learn freely.

Mitra's way rely's heavily on technology and there are no teachers. The children are given an open ended questions and work in groups of 4 to discover the answer. Their conclusions may differ from group to group depending where their research took them. It encourages deep learning, communication and group problem solving. Like Montessori, the ages of the children doesn't matter, they learn from each other, they are keen to show off their new skills and things that they have discovered.

One of Mitra's experiments really interested me, he set up a computer containing information about molecular biology in English for a group of Indian children who didn't speak English. After a couple of months the kids had learned enough to score about 30% on a test, after 150 days they were hitting a score of 50%

Mirtra then introduced a mediator, this woman had no knowledge of molecular biology and so she couldn't teach the kids anything, what she did do was ask probing questions to help the kids dig deeper. Again, their test score got to the point where they only got a few questions wrong. Not bad for a group of 10 years old Indian kids, hey!

I decide to try a little experiment of my own, I got on Facebook and asked some friends how to translate a sentence into their native tongue. This is what I got back...

Кто был Галилео Галилей и почему он важен.

And that is what I gave Ebi-kun, no explanation of what it was or what it meant, just the sentence on the screen. Then I walked away...

By himself he figured out how to use google translate, discovered it was written in Russian and what the question was ("Who was Galileo Galilei and why is he important?"). Then he went on to find out who Galileo was, he came across some words he didn't know, philosopher, astronomer and fundamental, so he looked those up too. He took notes and after 30 minutes (dinner was ready) he came back with this...

He really enjoyed doing it and asked if I can prepare him another BIG question for when he gets home from school. The only worry I have about all this is that he will accidentally come across some dodgy website, I have the safe function on the google searches, but stuff does slip through. Having the computer in the living area helps, at least I can keep an eye on him and what he is looking at.

One thing we lack is the aspect of working in a group, I am hoping that we can get together with friends and do it with the kids in the same room and I have also been thinking that we can do this using google hangout party. I will let you know how it goes!

For us, Ebi-kun will still attend a Japanese school, even though I don't agree with the teaching methods. School isn't just about maths and Japanese, he learns so much about being part of the community and the nuances of Japanese culture, that I can't teach him. We will be using more of this method along with Montessori to encourage the love of learning and keep his English fluent.

If you are interested in learning more, there is a very inspiration piece about a slum school in Mexico and one very bright little girl in Wired Magazine, information on how to get involved HERE and you can also download the free SOLE toolkit. You can also get Mitra's book, Beyond The Hole In The Wall for a couple of dollars on Amazon. 

I would love to know what you think about it all, share in the comments...

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