Topic 4 Word Processing

Word processing has perhaps had the greatest technological impact on education. It can be used to support any type of direct instruction or constructivist activity. The three biggest advantages are:

• Saves time - these documents make it very easy for teachers to modify existing materials instead of constantly creating new ones. It is also very east to make corrections.
• Enhances document appearance - the products produced by word processing look much more professional and polished than materials that are handwritten or typed.
• Allows sharing of documents - these documents make it very easy for teachers to share lesson plans. Students can also share ideas and products with each other.

Basic features include: storing for later use, storing in many formats, search and replace, move or copy text, and word wraparound.

Desktop publishing features include: alignment, changing appearance, insert headers/footers, insert colors, graphics, and text boxes.

Language features include: spell-check and grammar-check.

Web features include: inserting "live" URLs and Creating web pages.

Support features include: using templates, voice recognition, and merging text with data files.

As a teacher, I use existing word documents and create new documents every day. There are a plethora of uses for word documents in my classroom. I am in charge of planning math for my grade level. Each week, I type math plans on a word document and e-mail them to my coworkers. I am constantly typing handouts for parents and I print and e-mail them. Our spelling list is created on a word document and posted on my website. This has been especially helpful for my students in case they misplace their list. I have also created different research tools and fill-in-the-blank exercises for my kids to use when researching. I save these on the student public drive and they can access them on their own.

My students also love to create word documents. It makes their writing more novel to them. They think it is fun to publish their work and add pictures and colors. You would never think spelling sentences would be so fun, but my students love to create sentences and add pictures to them. Last year my students also created their own web pages. They had a portfolio of all the work they had created in class. They were able to link all of the documents they had created so they could look at their work anytime and anywhere using an Internet connection.

Word processing has so many benefits that it's hard to sum them all up. It is probably the most commonly used type of technology on our campus. Whether you are a young teacher or a veteran teacher....whether you are "tech savvy" or "tech illiterate" you have created and/or used a word document.