Experience has proven that it is impossible to imagine a modern school without new information technologies. It is obvious that in the near future with the introduction of personal computers will increase, which means that when teaching students, teachers should look for new ways and technologies of learning. Technologies for teaching writing and developing students’ writing skills are among such technologies that have already been successfully used.
The process of learning to write and develop writing and reading skills requires new approaches. When deciding on them, teachers are often confused: what to use for teaching, a keyboard or a pen? Of course, traditional writing and reading technologies are quite effective, but digital learning also has many advantages.
So, with the introduction of digital methods and techniques of learning to write, students experiencing physical or technical difficulties with writing can successfully express their thoughts in a digital version. Usually, difficulties in writing force such students to focus only on the writing technique, while all thoughts and ideas disappear.
Working with a single program, students and the teacher have access to their texts and tasks at any time, can fix them, finish, edit, analyze, evaluate. Such teamwork makes learning easier and more efficient.
Working with writing using various teaching tools and applications, the student gets a quick reaction to his/her writing: checking punctuation, grammar, searching words into words in a dictionary or thesaurus.
Learning to write and developing writing skills with the help of digital technologies inspires students for a new type of writing – keeping their own blog, which makes writing more effective.
The process of teaching reading and technical writing with the help of such tools allows teachers to make the learning process easier, more fun, more efficient, while conserving the nerves and strength of the teacher.
So, what types of teaching tools for kids are usually used and how they help the teacher make the process of learning to write interesting and effective?
Interactive whiteboard
No matter for what purpose, at what stage of the lesson the interactive whiteboard is used, it is a tool for visual presentation of data. The ability to work with the text analyzing it, as well as with individual sentences helps in writing.
So, the teacher types the text of the proposals in advance. Children go to the blackboard and insert the missing letters in the endings. Conveniently, you can use markers of different colors, depending on what type of work is performed. You can check the performance of work and, if necessary, correct errors, or perform tasks to determine the grammatical basis of sentences.
Applications for text dictation
They are effective when teaching students who experience certain difficulties in writing by hand. “It happens that a student has a lot of ideas, but it is physically difficult for him/her to type text on the keyboard. Or there are so many ideas, and the typing speed on the student’s keyboard is so low that as you enter text, all ideas and suggestions are lost. After all, even the authors of world bestsellers often suffer from the need to write by hand or type thoughts on the keyboard,” explains Jason Wittman, the Vip-Writers expert. “Such free applications for transforming audio into text allow you to keep your thoughts and enter any suggestions into the device without problems. After the dictation, the text appears on the device screen and, similarly, with a voice, it can be edited,” says Jason.
Grammar and Punctuation Checkers Applications
There are a lot of tools for checking spelling, grammar, and punctuation. They differ only in the interface and a set of dictionaries. Dictionaries are important for checking new words, some programs already know them, others do not yet exist. During a spell or grammar check, the program compares each word with a dictionary or with rules. Such Punctuation Checker tools can work online, or they can work without the Internet, they can be installed on a tablet, PC or any other electronic device. As a result, students get the opportunity to test their knowledge, edit their text, and remember the rules of writing.
Writing stories for a blog, twitter, other social networks
The most progressive teachers go beyond using conventional devices in teaching writing. Some of them are using the technology of social networks to teach students to write quite successfully. So, students are given the task to write an essay or a simple story on a given topic. After checking the text, students are encouraged to reduce the composition to a minimum, for example, up to 150 characters in order to publish it in a blog or social network. Students are willing to do this, developing thinking and writing skills. After all, as we know, it requires a lot of effort, analysis, and knowledge in order to reduce the work. Thus, social networks have broken free of being something useless, which simply kills the time of the student.
This also includes blogging.
That which teachers have been seeking from students in the classroom for so long, students have been successfully doing outside classes in social networks. They share their ideas with others, revealing their writing opportunities.
You can assign tasks for writing articles for a blog, with an indication of the target audience, topics, note size. Although even if the work is written in any form, if it is an arbitrary genre, blogging still develops writing skills, because such publications allow children to share their thoughts with others and discuss and analyze them openly.
And, If you want to check Internet speed, you can check via https://www.speedcheck.org/
Book Co-writing
The bottom line is to get together a student team and work together in an interesting, informal setting to write a book, under the supervision of a teacher. At the end of the semester, children receive the result of joint efforts – a book that can be printed, read in electronic form and even published. This kind of comprehensive written work not only unites but also opens up an endless stream of imagination, revealing the potential of students.
