Once it was abundantly clear to us that SOLE could work really well in lot of environments we begin to build out infrastructure to allow for rapid prototyping of the support systems to ultimately allow for viral spread of this thorough quick adoption, scalable ongoing support and sustainable funding streams. Because we have such great support from our initial funder I was able to really focus on testing the integration of the foundational elements, ensuring that they were ready to scale before seeking additional funders to really launch this.
In July of the 2015 we launched a really basic website. Equipped with a simple sign up feature that allowed us to track users, an area for teachers to find and share SOLE questions aligned to their content area, a map that showed where users were located, and a page where teachers could share resources such as graphic organizers, rubrics, and other documents that they found helpful with the process. Later that year we added a page with 27 video clips intended to teach any teacher how to use SOLE in their classroom right away. We saw a steady increase in registered users from the Cleveland area but we also started to see teachers signing up from other states and even other countries.
By the end of the first year we had over 700 registered users who were working with roughly 28000 students. We also stared a Facebook page and twitter account and began to see some activity from the community. Since then we have continued to update and fine tune our website based on analytics and feedback from users. We have added features including the ability to create a comprehensive 7 page lesson plan in less than 5 minutes, return to the lesson plan post SOLE session and reflect on the session, and the ability to earn a credential from CSU STEMM Center for documented work.
Jeff short bio info here.
