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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Chapter 8, Elementary Word Processing to Improve Writing

This chapter discussed the stress from increased state testing that is placed on the tstudents' quality of writing. This pressure tends to intimidate many teachers because it can take longer for young elementary students to grasp the organizational patterns of writing. Chapter 8 gives suggestions of different computer writing softwares that can be used in the classrooms to help iprove writing at the elementary level. The Step Up to Writing Program is a software that is designed to develop and organize pre-writing thoughts. A lot of the problems that younger students display with learning to write is how to generate and then organize all of their ideas.

Different writing computer softwares can help students to form and distinguish their writing skills through color coding and text to table conversion. As this chapter describes, converting the text sentences into a table helps young students to evaluate and revise their thoughts. These strategies can help the teachers stress the importance of revising your work in order to make it the best. I think that computer writing softwares can be beneficial in an elementary classroom because they would help to make ideas clearer and well-developed. I don't think that teachers should entirely depend on these softwares to improve their students' writing skills, but they would be useful in cleaning them up after the skills have been taught. It's important to create a strong writing foundation for students at an early age because writing is a way of communication and assessment.

1 comment:

Katelyn said...

Carlie,
I really liked how you said in your last paragraph teachers should not entirely depend on softwares to improve the students' quality of writing. I completely agree with this. This software sounds very beneficial and helpful, but it is good to remember that it can not be relied on as the main way to teach writing. You made a good point when you said that it would be useful after the skills have been taught.