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Purpose of Student Coach
Students interact with this non-judgmental smart-book to help themselves set clearer goals, make better decisions, manage time better, effectively handle conflict and much more. This “personal thinking and learning “ application uses coaching/facilitation principles that is designed primarily to be “used “ by students to support just-in-time thinking rather than “read” to support future thinking.
Smartbook Architecture & Customisation
Smartbook architecture provides for User (Student) interaction similar to using traditional software, but because it runs in MS Word, it allows for complete customisation. This means teachers, counselors, administrators or students themselves can customise this application for an entire school, grade level, one class, or just on type of student (ADD). In addition, it offers anytime/anywhere use.
Facilitation Technology and Coaching/Mentoring
Our facilitation technology approach fits well with coaching/mentoring practices. While smart-books obviously cannot duplicate the human coach/mentor, they can deliver many of the same coaching qualities like:
- Ask students empowering questions to stimulate their thinking and become more conscious of assumptions, beliefs and patterns of behaviour.
- Provide tools (we call thinklets) to improve thinking in areas ranging from goal setting, to problem solving to decision making.
- Provide different thinking techniques to develop new ways to think, new ways to look at and new approaches to deal wiht problems and life’s situations.
- Guide thinking in ways to help (re) build self-esteem by finding an individual’s unique talents and success factors.
- Offers a non-judgmental, unbiased and safe work environment.
- Smart-books are living documents that can evolve with the student over the course of the year, or even year to year.
Note: What these smart-books cannot provide is immediate feedback and dialogue with students. However, a student’s willingness for feedback after he/she has input their unfettered thoughts might offer a different set of insights.
Educational Uses
Besides self-development, use this smart-book in a variety of other ways:
- Print and use as hardcopy workbooks.
- Use it with electronic white boards.
- Use a projector to display it.
- Put it on a network for shared team use.
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