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Sunday, September 9, 2007

Microsoft

From browsing the other blogs the general consensus seems to be people thought they knew a lot about Microsoft Word, I have to say I am in that same boat. Before this class I believed that I knew most of the important features of Word, I never knew it was capable of doing so many things. However, I am not yet convinced that I'll ever feel the need to use some of the features. To me, the readability analysis seems like an unnecessary feature. The reason I say this is, I believe as an English teacher I feel that I should be able to analyze how appropriate a document or book is for my students. I think it's an interesting feature but I don't feel that it is reliable enough to use in the classroom setting. I also fear that some teachers, not all or the majority, but some will rely too heavily on it and become lazy. I feel that it is a disservice to students. I can't see myself using it in the classroom because I would need to read documents, books, and papers anyways so I feel it might waste my time to run it through Word. However, now that I know this feature exists I may run it on some documents just for fun, to see how they are analyzed.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed learning about the electronic editing. I have had professors here at IWU use that feature while editing my papers and I really like it. I think it is neater, and it ensures that I am able to read their comments without difficulty. I can truly see myself using this in the classroom. Especially because I will inevitably be reading many papers and editing for my students as an English teacher. As our professor said during class, it is much easier to edit on the computer than it would be to carry a lot of papers home and edit them by hand. The only flaw in this plan is if I work in a school or district where students don't always have access to computers. If that is the case I'm sure I will be able to figure something out. But, I look forward to making good use of electronic editing. I think this class will offer many useful new features and tips that will be very useful to me in the future.

1 comment:

Lauren Booth said...

I agree with you about the readability analysis. I also think it is an interesting tool, but I think we would be doing our students a disservice by relying on the computer to "grade" it. Maybe it could be used as a supplement to the grading we do.