Typing vs Writing

Image: jomurpheyblogspot.com

Have you ever sat in the proximity of someone writing who can touch-type? They sit nonchalantly in front of the screen, their fingers dancing over the keys; meanwhile I sit hunched over the keyboard like Gollum, forehead facing the screen instead of, well, my face. Hunting for keys and pecking at the keyboard, before eventually, and with great trepidation, looking up at the screen only to be presented with a mangled representation of the thoughts I so diligently delivered with my not so deft strokes—littered with the red lines demanding that I attempt again to wrestle the meaning from the scrambled melange of words, words that barely resemble the ideas I am attempting to represent, even now fading from my short term memory…

I worked with some colleagues to write an article on this very topic for the college magazine, Dunia, an exercise that required us to read a wide range of research on the topic, the outcome of which I have summed up at the bottom of this post if you're interested. All of this reading led me to the point I am now, namely a great deal more aware of the tensions, and especially the misconceptions that surround this issue...

This may come as a surprise to many, but typing faster is not the primary objective of learning to touch-type; rather it is a desired side effect. Once you are able to type with all ten fingers without needing to look down at the keyboard, your overall productivity when using a computer will improve dramatically. When typing with two fingers (hunt and peck), "the visual and frontal cortices of the brain are forced to focus on where individual keys are located. Keyboarding removes this burden, enabling students to work on things like sentence structure and grammar while they type." (Typing Club Handbook)

The danger with this issue is that it quickly devolves into an 'us vs them' argument, this is not a an argument we need to have, and not one I intend to get drawn into here, besides others far more eloquent than I have already done this far better than I could, such as this article from The New York Times.

I think it helps if we stop and consider what it is what we are really talking about, it's not about typing or writing, typing is writing, what do we mean when we talk about writing?

Writing Defined

In the interests of clarity it's important to establish from the outset that there are at least four different ways of coding meaning using the symbols we call 'letters' that equate to sounds that we in turn translate into words, in other words—writing. Some of these are easily confused, this confusion can easily led to 'much ado about nothing', for example no matter the enthusiasm for touch-typing, no one is considering abandoning the teaching of handwriting, cursive maybe, but handwriting? No.

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Touch-typing:

Touch typing (also called touch type or touch method or touch and type method) is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory.

Hunt and peck/two finger typing/keyboarding

"Hunt and peck (two-fingered typing) is a common form of typing, in which the typist presses each key individually. Instead of relying on the memorized position of keys, the typist must find each key by sight. Use of this method may also prevent the typist from being able to see what has been typed without glancing away from the keys. Although good accuracy may be achieved, any typing errors that are made may not be noticed immediately, if at all." (Wikipedia)

Handwriting 

Handwriting refers to a person's writing created with a writing utensil such as a pen or pencil. The term encompasses both printing and cursive styles and is separate from formal calligraphy or typeface. It is, in essence, a visible form of a person's voice, including pitch and tone.

Cursive

Cursive, also known as longhand, script, handwriting, joined-up writing et cetera, is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins and pen lifts.

Print-script or Block-letters

Print-script uses block letters, in which the letters of a word are unconnected rather than joined-up script. Block-letters (known as print-script, manuscript, or print writing) are a style of writing in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining. In English-speaking countries, children are often first taught to write in block-letters, and later may advance to cursive (joined-up writing).

Handwriting vs Touch-Typing: The Research 

There are a plethora of articles bouncing around the web, more or less like this one, purporting in tones of moral crisis that the worst thing we could possibly entertain is a world with a generation who can no longer write in looping flowing cursive... These articles usually attempt to bolster their argument by making appeals to supposed brain research that evidences a higher level of brain function when putting pen/pencil to paper as opposed to tapping keys...

The problem with these arguments, as is often the case with attempts to leverage research within a field that most 'lay people' have absolutely no grasp of, is it's easy to completely misinterpret the data, usually in favour of a particular argument. We should all be very wary of the claims and 'The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience'; over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. That's not to say that it is meaningless, far from it, new research into how our brains work "offers educators an unparalleled opportunity for building a scientific foundation for educational practice which will allow us to make more informed decisions". It's just that we should be cautious when extravagant claims are founded on area of learning that is as best currently relatively nascent, "it is important to realize that neuroimaging is just one of many tools used in neuroscience. Equally important is the fact that neuroscience is widely viewed as rudimentary in its current state".

This article being a case in point; the author leaps to the assumption that the data must mean that handwriting is superior to typing, when the issue is not actually the mode of codifying meaning, it's the processing. So people taking notes who can touch-type have a tendency to transcribe, just because they can, rather than processing the information, ie summarizing, summing up, rephrasing. Touch-typists who do the latter rather than the former will be engaged in the same kinds of cognitive function as those handwriting. So the answer is not to demonise those who can touch-type, but rather to educate them.

"The thing is, that transcription process doesn’t require any critical thinking." 

“transcrib[ing] lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Of course all of this makes the extremely dubious assumption that lecturing and the accompanying practice of expecting the attendant students to sit their and passively take notes is a medium of teaching that we need to desperately go to all sorts of lengths to support and enable. This couldn't be further from the truth, as acclaimed Harvard Professor, Eric Mazur realised years ago, when he discovered that the notion that the clear, polished lectures and demonstrations he was delivering to lecture halls populated mainly by premed and engineering students was successful “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” Now his focus has moved away from the lectern and toward the physical and imaginative activity of each student in class. Now his focus on "interactive pedagogy turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view. Thousands of research studies on learning indicate that “active learning is really at a premium." It’s the most effective thing. Not note taking, and certainly not lecturing.

Yes, I realise that not all of us are as fortunate as the students of Professor Mazur, so what do we do if we are confronted with the reality that some teachers still cling to this inefficient, unsuccessful practice? Simple, don't transcribe, process and reframe (and get a better a teacher if you possibly can).

Note taking really has nothing to do with handwriting or touch-typing. The people I feel for when these debates erupt, are our students who, due to 'special needs' have to type because they don't have the fine motor skills to write, do we really want them to feel like the modes that they have to use are actually inferior?

Stop taking notes and listen!

Personally I like the best of both, but as a general practice, I avoid taking notes at all, and I'm not the only one... This way I can concentrate on the content being communicated, if there is the odd fascinating fact/finding/phenomenon that I absolutely have to record, I take notes by hand, mainly because I find using the temptations proffered by a digital device (know thyself!) quite distracting. After all, all note taking really is is yet another form of the rightly demonised 'multi-tasking' which just results in another 'lose-lose' scenario...  So I minimise note-taking, and later on dictate my core recollections into screen text, (I can't touch-type—yet) which usually involves still more of that all important processing. Also in this day and age, I think we should expect the presenter to provide notes online.

Having trawled the literature I can honestly say that the findings do many things, but criticise the need to learn the skill of touch-typing they do not. The arguments they do make are moot points, as their findings are at best tangential to the questions that surround the considerations that related to touch-typing:

• We learn how to form/recognise letters via handwriting (not cursive), fair enough, but this is an argument for learning block-letters, or print-script, in kindergarten, not an argument for learning cursive.
• There are possible benefits to writing cursive, but they still concede this is not an argument against learning touch-typing, more an argument against abandoning cursive, so not either/or but both.
• 'Hunt and peck' typing is faster and more efficient than cursive, in experienced adults, but slower and less efficient with young children. But ‘hunt and peck’ is still considerably inferior to touch typing in terms of its conduciveness for good writing..
• Research asserting that handwriting is better for note-taking is widely misinterpreted, it's the practice of transcription as opposed to processing that is the issue, not the medium—for our Learning Support students this is an especially important point. Touch-typing does not render them second class citizens in the arena of understanding.
• Regardless of the arguments for/against, there are profound cognitive benefits to students who can touch type compared to those relying on a 'hunt and peck ' strategy. 

There is also plenty of research that compares touch typing favourably to handwriting:

The computer vs. The pen: a comparative study of word processing... 

"students in the Computer group, on the whole, wrote better than those in a Pen group. According to the Jacobs et al. (1981) Composition Profile, all aspects of writing except Content and Organization showed highly significant differences, with the Computer group exhibiting superior performance".
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0958822950080106

The need for handwriting to aid letter recognition in the early years

The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing. "The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691804001167

Teaching elementary age children touch-typing as an aid to Language Arts instruction

Typed writing has been shown to improve students reading, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and creative writing abilities.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198297?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The word processing approach to language experience

The word processor not only makes LEA easier for teacher and student, it enhances the value of the approach as well.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2019884

Looking at the keyboard or the monitor: relationship with text production processes

"In this paper we explored text production differences in an expository text production task between writers who looked mainly at the keyboard and writers who looked mainly at the monitor. Eye-tracking technology and keystroke-logging were combined to systematically describe and define these two groups in respect of the complex interplay between text production and the reading of one’s own emerging text. Findings showed that monitor gazers typed significantly faster and were more productive writers. They also read their own text more, and they frequently read in parallel with writing."
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-009-9189-3

Writing the natural way: on a computer

A model of computer writing skill is presented that consists of four stages of development‐‐(1) Writing Easier, (2) Writing More, (3) Writing Differently, (4) Writing Better‐‐representing the evolution of a natural computer‐based writing approach under favorable conditions. The relevant conditions comprise the starting state of the user and a range of constraints on computer use.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0958822960090205

Image: Bruce Almighty, via persephonemagazine.com

Efficiency

The speed of (legible) handwriting (with or without cursive) is much slower with touch-typing. Over to Wikipedia for the breakdown of relative speeds:

The average human being hand-writes at 31 words per minute (WPM) for memorised text and 22 words per minute while copying (Brown CM, 1988).

Whereas an average professional typist types usually in speeds of 50 to 80 wpm, some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm. "Hunt and peck" typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorised text and 27 WPM when copying text.

Go on, try it yourself, I used typeracer, and scored 35 WPM, first try, then timed myself writing the same text (so a slight advantage) as fast as I could by hand, focusing on speed over beauty, but still maintaining legibility, and scored ... 17 WPM. Pathetic, I know.

So to summarise: that's handwriting at 22 WPM, hunt & peck at 27 WPM (about the same) and between 50-120 WPM for touch-typists. So, if we don't teach our students how to touch-type they are in theory, after ten years of 'hunt and pecking' at least no worse off than they would have been if we'd asked them to write it all by hand. Although research on cognition in relation to writing gives us some pause for thought when they politely highlight the fact that the 'hunting and pecking' process effectively makes the cognitive process of writing far less efficient, as the resources which should be dedicated to composition are instead being dedicated to hunting for letters to peck... 

In other words, when you can touch-type, the cognitive load of writing and thinking at the same time are lessened and free up working memory for thinking—a bit like cycling a bicycle—once the effort required for remaining balanced, and changing gears et cetera are automatic, you can spend more time noticing/enjoying where you are going.  The same idea applies to things like decoding in reading via ‘sight words’, this frees thinking space for understanding instead of decoding.  The absence of effort in one frees cognitive space for the other…

So, the gains with touch-typing frees up cognitive space, and increases speed, with typing hovering in the range of double to triple the speed of handwriting. And of course none of this even considers arguably the most important element; digital text is capable of so much more than handwritten text.

Distinctive features of word processing that support creativity 

"We think that there are distinctive features of ICT that can support creativity and they can be described as follows: 'provisionality', 'interactivity', 'capacity', 'range', 'speed', 'accuracy', 'quality', 'automation', 'multi-modality', 'neutrality' and 'social credibility'."

Loveless A (2002) Literature Review in Creativity, New Technologies and Learning


"The provisionality of ICT enables users to make changes, try out alternatives and keep a 'trace' of the development of ideas. Interactivity engages users at a number of levels, through immediate and dynamic feedback. ICT demonstrates capacity and range in the ways in which it affords access to vast amounts of information locally and globally in different time zones and geographical places. The speed and automation ICT allows tasks of storing, transforming and displaying information to be carried out by the technologies, enabling users to read, observe, interrogate, interpret, analyse and synthesise information at higher levels. Quality can be recognised in the potential to present and publish work to a high standard of appearance and reproduction. Multimodality is reflected in the interaction between modes of text, image, sound, hyper textuality and non-familiarity..." p 94

Loveless, A., & Wegerif, R. (2004). Unlocking creativity with ICT. Unlocking Creativity: A Teacher's Guide to Creativity Across the Curriculum, 92.

Typing is Writing

Confession. I have believed for years that touch-typing is clearly useful, but not essential, why?

• a stubborn reluctance to commit to the discipline that learning this skill requires

• a possibly naïve expectation that keyboards will be go the way of the Walkman soon,

• the recent exponential improvement in the accessibility, reliability and accuracy of speech recognition tools like Apple Dictation.

However, I now realise...

• there are few, if any, life skills that can be learned in less than 3 months based on a commitment of 10-15 minutes a day that would literally reap benefits almost every day, for the rest of our lives, furthermore, with the plethora of online touch-typing tutorial tools it’s never been easier.

• keyboards (or similar) aren’t becoming obsolete any day soon, aside from the profound difficulties people face when thinking and speaking, as opposed thinking and typing, short of wearing a menacing helmet with sensors that allow the computer to recognise my thoughts (and who would really want that?), we are always going to require some sort of physical interface that we can interact with to be able to transmit our ideas into words.

• voice recognition tools lose their efficacy in a shared space, which as a teacher, and certainly for our students, is more than the case than not.

This is not an argument against handwriting, typing is also writing. Our choice, much like the difference between handwriting using print script or flowing cursive, is whether to become adept at typing or to resign ourselves to the mind numbing frustration of ‘hunting and pecking’. The keyboard is here to stay; our choice is to either master it, or to spend the rest of our lives wrestling with it.

The 10 Commandments of Word Processing

This has to be one of the most commonly used ICT skills, even be the most tech reluctant, but unfortunately as most of us are self taught, there are quite a few aspects that have been poorly learned, are poorly practised, and are now inevitably poorly taught...

The good news is that once you know what you don't know, it's easy to fix, the chances are, no matter how long you've been word processing, you will find a few surprises in this list:

1. Thou shalt use spell check (but don't rely on spellcheck—homophones much?). 
2. Thou shalt use the built in thesaurus (and use 'Command+F' to check for repetition!).
3. Thou shalt not ignore the grammar/proof reading tool—if it's got a squiggly line under it, check it!
4. Thous shalt not centre text by tapping the spacebar, use the centre align icon on the formatting bar. 
5. Verily the same is true for tabbing, use the tab key to indent, not the spacebar (also useful for adding a new row to the bottom of a table).
6. Thou shalt not do things manually that can be done automatically; like adding page numbers, numbered lists, or creating a table of contents.
7. Thou shalt use the 'paste unformatted' or 'paste as text' option to avoid reformatting all the text you paste in. Every. Time.
8. Thou shalt use the styles menu to structure your document with headings etc (and you can't use some automatic features without this).
9. Thou shalt insert a page break if you want a new page (don't just repeatedly hammer the return key).
10. Thou shalt not hammer keyboard keys— NEVER press a space bar more than once, or a return key more than twice. 

All of the above are true regardless of the tool you use for word processing, from MS Word, to Pages, to Google Docs. The last of these is arguably the most practical in our context, so here's some specific pointers:

Google Doc formatting like a boss... 

Use the templates to get a head start, these also function is great 'mentor texts' for students to see how formatting using Styles looks and works. Instead of creating a Doc within Google Drive, click on the Google Grid and select Docs—Voilah!



Inside any Google Doc, the Styles menu allows you to format your document with a couple of clicks,  you can even customise this menu so the Styles use the fonts and formatting you prefer, these will be available in any Google Doc you create or edit.



Once you've formatted your document using Styles, you can add a Table of Contents with a couple of clicks, just go to Insert > Table of Contents. All the formatting, and page numbering all done for you, you can even choose a more screen friendly version that makes all the headers hyperlinked.

Can you show me?

Google have an online guide that will step you through all of the above, and this article has a similar guide to the skills I've outlined above, but specifically tailored to Microsoft Office, and with lots of nice pictures! The key takeaway is that these skills are conventions that apply regardless of the platform, device or application you use, from MS Word, to Pages to Google Docs, they all utilise and provide these features.

Last but not least, here are some video tutorials I made a few years ago, this is in the older version of Pages, but as is often the case with tech, not much has really changed, these fundamentals of word processing are pretty much unchanged in over two decades!

21st Century Spelling

Spilling had never bin maw impotent

Spelling has never been more important, as my example above attempts to illustrate. In an age dominated by screens, misspelling is tantamount to an admission of idiocy—but the ways we teach spelling needs to evolve to take advantage of the unique affordances and challenges of spelling in a screen environment. Please note that none of the words in the title are actually misspellings, but mistakes they are, and a right twazzock you will look if you spell in a way that is overly reliant on proofreading tools as a safety net. It's time we took account of the fact that in a world dominated by screens the ways we teach spelling needs to evolve to take advantage of the unique affordances and challenges of spelling in a screen environment.

These days the likelihood of interacting with others in a digital environment is an extremely commonplace scenario. Even more critical, people who misspell in these environments are generally assumed to be less intelligent, less articulate, and despite their possible intelligence/experience, their perspective will be dismissed or demeaned if it is littered with misspellings.

It has never been more important to master the ability to spell correctly. 

Unfortunately most schools, despite the criticality of spelling in the 21st-century, still rely on 19th century strategies to teach spelling. This really does need to change. So, with that in mind...

Critical considerations:

1. Children (and adults) can only spell words they know, sounds obvious, but so many of the spelling lists that are used with students contain words they do not know, so could not possibly be able to spell, other than through guesswork, which leads us to... The corollary to this is the simple fact that the skill of knowing or suspecting that a spelling is wrong is an essential aspect of learning how to spell, especially in a world where checking a spelling is as easy as 'searching it up' in Google, or just asking your smartphone to spell it for you. 
2. There is a much greater validity to the skill of being able "guesstimate" in a TELE (technology enhanced learning environment), and ‘phonological awareness’ is more essential than ever, as an accurate phonetical estimation is relied on by computers to substitute for a correct spelling. A student who cannot phonetically 'approach' a word is unlikely to be able to approximate something that a computer can correct. Related to this is the critical importance of being able to spell the first half of a word correctly, most modern computing devices can now auto complete a word if a student is able to spell the first half of it correctly. Apple's 'QuickType' in iOS 8, and apps like "SwiftKey" utilise this approach very effectively, and the power of Dictation (speech to text) has never been greater, but it will still struggle with homophones (same sound different spelling and meaning). An alternative approach in a traditional 'spelling test' context is to award 2 marks to each word, one mark for being able to spell the word phonetically correctly, or for spelling the first half correctly, and 2 marks if the word is perfect. 
3. Stop using spelling tests for whole classes with lists of words, this is a nonsensical approach, considering the sheer quantity of words in the typical English dictionary, somewhere in excess of 400,000 words. The words that children learn should be unique and curated from their own literacy life, related to their own writing, reading and speaking, and viewing and listening experiences, or related to specific vocabulary that they are using/used will need to use.
4. Wordlists curated by students should be seen as a source of vocabulary expansion, not just for spelling. Becoming a personal thesaurus/glossary that they should review regularly when writing to enhance the richness of their prose; use it or lose it.
5. Listening matters just as much than looking (Riesenhuber, 2013). If you can see the word before you spell it, then you're not learning how to spell, you're practising short term recall. Listening is also essential for checking spelling, now computers have the option to speak any word you can type, select the word and have the computer read it out loud, is this the word you were trying to spell?
6. Less reliance upon "spelling rules" which are very rarely consistent, and in many cases can lead to a great deal of confusion. Like when students are asked to note the position of a certain vowel in a word and its impact upon other vowels or consonants within that word, also using acrostics like 'big elephants can always understand...' you get the idea, and of course they only work for one word… Instead focus on more reliance on building familiarity with the way words look and the way words sound, so 'look say cover write check' still works well as a useful skill/drill practice, (or better still: listen say type look) but with fewer words, more often. This is strongly related to the student's reading life as a synergetic enabler in their spelling life. This becomes a context where students are encouraged to see words as 'friends' and building a large community of 'familiar faces' ie, the more they see these words the more likely they are to be able to spell them, or arguably just as important in the 21st-century, to recognise when the word is not spelt properly, ‘it just doesn't look right'. We see words like faces? Yes, believe it or not, this is exactly what neuroscience (McCandliss et al, 2003) has taught us, more on that phenomenon below... 
7. Skill drill tasks (practise makes permanent) should also be related to an activity that reinforces their comprehension of the meaning of the word, so ideally students should also invent (not copy) a sentence that uses the word, or even better, more than one of the words in the same sentence, that clearly demonstrates that they can use the word/s with an understanding of it/them. After all, what is the point of learning how to spell a word if you don't know how to use it? For some students it might be better for them to make an oral recording of them speaking the sentence rather than writing a sentence, if the writing is a challenge to reluctant writers, as the focus is on understanding meaning, and oral recall can be just as effective for building meaning, this is especially important with homophones.
8. More recognition of the kinds of spellings that are particularly tricky in a screen centred writing environment, this means a greater emphasis on distinguishing between words with similar sounds and different patterns, homophones, homonyms, homographs.
9. Making smarter use of digital tools to facilitate this kind of practice, while spelling games that are built on skill drill using pre-set wordlists are useful, but you should also encourage spelling drills that are built on individually curated wordlists. However these kinds of Apps are not very common, but at least one that does this very well is Squeebles SP, more on this below...
10. Use any text app or word processor to spell check, before using a teacher. This could be a simple as a notes app on a mobile device, this will enable students to check spellings without the tedium of using a dictionary. Then a far more appropriate use of teacher time is to review spellings for careless mistakes, or more likely mistakes resulting from misconceptions about phonetics/word structure, especially spellings that alter the meaning of a sentence. Students need to be empowered to build habits of capturing/collecting words that they know, but cannot spell in their curated lists. The point is, it is better for the student to attempt to type the word in a text application and have the computer suggest corrections than it is for them to try and search for it in a dictionary. While the latter is still helpful, the former is a better cognitive process for learning the spelling of a word, and is also more relevant/likely as an activity or skill set in the 21st-century. Very few adults look up words in a dictionary, most rely on the prompt given by the computer in a word processing environment. Even better, if this list is 'situated' or cloud synced (Google Doc, iCloud Notes) they can access, add to and augment that list from home or school. 
11. Encourage students to learn how to use the "define:" search term in Google, effectively turning any Google search window into a handy Dictionary, eg - define:magnificent
12. Digital technologies are changing which words are traditionally understood to be "tricky" words/sneaky spellings… so for example any word typed in a text environment will automatically switch the 'ie' in a word like receive, but will not be able to distinguish between homonyms.

Don't teach, facilitate

Neuroscience over the past decade* reveals fascinating insights into the way our brains learn words. Studies indicate that we use the same parts of brain (both left and right) to process face recognition that we use to process word recognition. So much so in fact, that as we move from early childhood into adulthood and become more proficient in word recognition, our capacity to recognise and process faces is diminished—such is the veracity of the connection. 

The parts of our brain (The Visual Word Form Area) that recognise and process faces are the same parts that recognise and process words. This emphasises the fact that spelling is primarily visual and aural, so a rote learning, rule based model is less effective than building an awareness of the unique formation of every word through familiarity, not drilling lists.

Even more fascinating, the VWFA area, "when volunteers listened to spoken sentences, all their brains showed similar responses." When we read, we recognise words as pictures and hear them spoken aloud, we literally “hear” written words in our head (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011).

Words are fundamentally processed and catalogued by their basic sounds and shapes, through visual and aural practice. Think of the way we learn to recognise faces, and pronounce words—certainly not by processing and practising lists of them, we learned them through exposure, and continued feedback, and it just so happens that screens are ideal for immediate, context specific feedback, in way that spelling on paper can never hope to provide. Provide lots of opportunities for students to learn how to spell through this kind of exposure, not through drilling them in lists that have little or no relevance to their own reading, writing, listening or speaking experiences. 

Squeebles Showcase

Squeebles Spelling - multimodal drill and practice

I'm not usually one to emphasise a tool, but from time to time a tool emerges that has affordances that are ridiculous to ignore, Squeebles Spelling is one of those. Digital tools like Squeebles can transform spelling practice by making traditional equivalents pale in comparison, consider the following:

Flexibility

Click to see Squeebles in action! 

Kids can 'masquerade' as a parent or teacher to curate their own lists, careless errors are mitigated by the built in spell check—obviously this feature is not activated when they are actually practising! Alternatively, there are a wide range of built in word lists to choose from that cater to all skill levels.

Multimodality and meaning

It's not enough to spell a word, they need to know how it sounds and understand the meaning. In Squeebles kids can record the sound of the word, as well place it in a sentence, eg "Pear. I like the taste of a pear better than an apple. Pear." Better still make it fun by having the kids make up silly sentences, as long as it shows they understand the meaning anything goes! This makes the activity aural and oral - this way the kids say the word, hear the word, and see the word. 

Immediate feedback - differentiated

No need to wait for a teacher to collect in all the spelling tests, then wait a few days to get them all back, even then, actually acting on the spelling errors is a chore, never mind tracking these over time. Squeebles provides immediate feedback, but even better keeps a record of any errors in a collection called 'Tricky Words' that reflect the words that this individual is struggling with.

Motivation

Last and maybe least, Squeebles 'gamifies' the successes into mini games, so kids feels a tangible sense of reward, over and above the real reward—improved spelling.

Further reading

http://doverliteracy.blogspot.sg/2014/09/individualised-spelling-practice.html

http://mrsevonsthirdgrade.blogspot.sg/2014/08/words-thier-way-spelling-11-classroom.html

http://smartblogs.com/education/2014/02/03/5-reasons-to-teach-spelling-handwriting-in-the-new-year/

Typing vs Writing

Image: jomurpheyblogspot.com

Have you ever sat in the proximity of someone writing who can touch-type? They sit nonchalantly in front of the screen, their fingers dancing over the keys; meanwhile I sit hunched over the keyboard like Gollum, forehead facing the screen instead of, well, my face. Hunting for keys and pecking at the keyboard, before eventually, and with great trepidation, looking up at the screen only to be presented with a mangled representation of the thoughts I so diligently delivered with my not so deft strokes—littered with the red lines that demand I attempt again to wrestle the meaning from the scrambled melange of words, words that barely resemble the ideas I am attempting to represent, even now fading from my short term memory…

This may come as a surprise to many, but typing faster is not the primary objective of learning to touch-type; rather it is a desired side effect. Once you are able to type with all ten fingers without needing to look down at the keyboard, your overall productivity when using a computer will improve dramatically. When typing with two fingers (hunt and peck), "the visual and frontal cortices of the brain are forced to focus on where individual keys are located. Keyboarding removes this burden, enabling students to work on things like sentence structure and grammar while they type." (Typing Club Handbook)

Writing Defined

In the interests of clarity it's important to establish from the outset that there are at least four different ways of coding meaning using the symbols we call 'letters' that equate to sounds that we in turn translate into words, in other words—writing. Some of these are easily confused, this confusion can easily led to 'much ado about nothing', for example no matter the enthusiasm for touch-typing, no one is considering abandoning the teaching of handwriting, cursive maybe, but handwriting? No.

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Touch-typing:

Touch typing (also called touch type or touch method or touch and type method) is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory.

Hunt and peck/two finger typing/keyboarding

"Hunt and peck (two-fingered typing) is a common form of typing, in which the typist presses each key individually. Instead of relying on the memorized position of keys, the typist must find each key by sight. Use of this method may also prevent the typist from being able to see what has been typed without glancing away from the keys. Although good accuracy may be achieved, any typing errors that are made may not be noticed immediately, if at all." (Wikipedia)

Handwriting 

Handwriting refers to a person's writing created with a writing utensil such as a pen or pencil. The term encompasses both printing and cursive styles and is separate from formal calligraphy or typeface. It is, in essence, a visible form of a person's voice, including pitch and tone.

Cursive

Cursive, also known as longhand, script, handwriting, joined-up writing et cetera, is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins and pen lifts.

Print-script or Block-letters

Print-script uses block letters, in which the letters of a word are unconnected rather than joined-up script. Block-letters (known as print-script, manuscript, or print writing) are a style of writing in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining. In English-speaking countries, children are often first taught to write in block-letters, and later may advance to cursive (joined-up writing).

Handwriting vs Touch-Typing: The Research 

There are a plethora of articles bouncing around the web, more or less like this one, purporting in tones of moral crisis that the worst thing we could possibly entertain is a world with a generation who can no longer write in looping flowing cursive... These articles usually attempt to bolster their argument by making appeals to supposed brain research that evidences a higher level of brain function when putting pen/pencil to paper as opposed to tapping keys...

The problem with these arguments, as is often the case with attempts to leverage research within a field that most 'lay people' have absolutely no grasp of, is it's easy to completely misinterpret the data, usually in favour of a particular argument. We should all be very wary of the claims and 'The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience'; over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. That's not to say that it is meaningless, far from it, new research into how our brains work "offers educators an unparalleled opportunity for building a scientific foundation for educational practice which will allow us to make more informed decisions". It's just that we should be cautious when extravagant claims are founded on area of learning that is as best currently relatively nascent, "it is important to realize that neuroimaging is just one of many tools used in neuroscience. Equally important is the fact that it is widely viewed as rudimentary in its current state".

This article being a case in point; the author leaps to the assumption that the data must mean that handwriting is superior to typing, when the issue is not actually the mode of codifying meaning, it's the processing. So people taking notes who can touch-type have a tendency to transcribe, just because they can, rather than processing the information, ie summarizing, summing up, rephrasing. Touch-typists who do the latter rather than the former will be engaged in the same kinds of cognitive function as those handwriting. So the answer is not to demonise those who can touch-type, but rather to educate them.

"The thing is, that transcription process doesn’t require any critical thinking." 

“transcrib[ing] lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Of course all of this makes the extremely dubious assumption that lecturing and the accompanying practice of expecting the attendant students to sit their and passively take notes is a medium of teaching that we need to desperately go to all sorts of lengths to support and enable. This couldn't be further from the truth, as acclaimed Harvard Professor, Eric Mazur realised years ago, when he discovered that the notion that the clear, polished lectures and demonstrations he was delivering to lecture halls populated mainly by premed and engineering students was successful “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” Now his focus has moved away from the lectern and toward the physical and imaginative activity of each student in class. Now his focus on "interactive pedagogy turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view. Thousands of research studies on learning indicate that “active learning is really at a premium." It’s the most effective thing. Not note taking, and certainly not lecturing.

Yes, I realise that not all of us are as fortunate as the students of Professor Mazur, so what do we do when we are confronted with the reality that some teachers still cling to this inefficient practice? Simple, don't transcribe, process and reframe (and get a better a teacher if you possibly can).

Note taking really has nothing to do with handwriting or touch-typing. The people I feel for when these debates erupt, are our students who, due to 'special needs' have to type because they don't have the fine motor skills to write, do we really want them to feel like the modes that they have to use are actually inferior?

Stop taking notes and listen!

Personally I like the best of both, but as a general practice, I avoid taking notes at all, and I'm not the only one.. This way I can concentrate on the content being communicated, if there is the odd fascinating fact/finding/phenomenon that I absolutely have to record, I take notes by hand, mainly because I find using the temptations proffered by a digital device (know thyself!) quite distracting. After all, all note taking really is is yet another form of the rightly demonised 'multi-tasking' which just results in another 'lose-lose' scenario...  So I minimise note-taking, and later on dictate my core recollections into screen text, (I can't touch-type—yet) which usually involves still more of that all important processing. Also in this day and age, I think we should expect the presenter to provide notes online.

Having trawled the literature I can honestly say that the findings do many things, but criticise the need to learn the skill of touch-typing they do not. The arguments they do make are moot points, as their findings are at best tangential to the questions that surround the considerations that related to touch-typing:

• We learn how to form/recognise letters via handwriting (not cursive), fair enough, but this is an argument for learning block-letters, or print-script, in kindergarten, not an argument for learning cursive.
• There are possible benefits to writing cursive, but they still concede this is not an argument against learning touch-typing, more an argument against abandoning cursive, so not either/or but both.
• 'Hunt and peck' typing is faster and more efficient than cursive, in experienced adults, but slower and less efficient with young children. But ‘hunt and peck’ is still considerably inferior to touch typing in terms of its conduciveness for good writing..
• Research asserting that handwriting is better for note-taking is widely misinterpreted, it's the practice of transcription as opposed to processing that is the issue, not the medium—for our Learning Support students this is an especially important point. Touch-typing does not render them second class citizens in the arena of understanding.
• Regardless of the arguments for/against, there are profound cognitive benefits to students who can touch type compared to those relying on a 'hunt and peck ' strategy. 

There is also plenty of research that compares touch typing favourably to handwriting:

The computer vs. The pen: a comparative study of word processing... 

"students in the Computer group, on the whole, wrote better than those in a Pen group. According to the Jacobs et al. (1981) Composition Profile, all aspects of writing except Content and Organization showed highly significant differences, with the Computer group exhibiting superior performance".
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0958822950080106

The need for handwriting to aid letter recognition in the early years

The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing. "The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691804001167

Teaching elementary age children touch-typing as an aid to Language Arts instruction

Typed writing has been shown to improve students reading, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and creative writing abilities.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198297?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The word processing approach to language experience

The word processor not only makes LEA easier for teacher and student, it enhances the value of the approach as well.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2019884

Looking at the keyboard or the monitor: relationship with text production processes

"In this paper we explored text production differences in an expository text production task between writers who looked mainly at the keyboard and writers who looked mainly at the monitor. Eye-tracking technology and keystroke-logging were combined to systematically describe and define these two groups in respect of the complex interplay between text production and the reading of one’s own emerging text. Findings showed that monitor gazers typed significantly faster and were more productive writers. They also read their own text more, and they frequently read in parallel with writing."
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-009-9189-3

Writing the natural way: on a computer

A model of computer writing skill is presented that consists of four stages of development‐‐(1) Writing Easier, (2) Writing More, (3) Writing Differently, (4) Writing Better‐‐representing the evolution of a natural computer‐based writing approach under favorable conditions. The relevant conditions comprise the starting state of the user and a range of constraints on computer use.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0958822960090205

Image: Bruce Almighty, via persephonemagazine.com

Efficiency

The speed of (legible) handwriting (with or without cursive) is much slower with touch-typing. Over to Wikipedia for the breakdown of relative speeds:

The average human being hand-writes at 31 words per minute (WPM) for memorised text and 22 words per minute while copying (Brown CM, 1988).

Whereas an average professional typist types usually in speeds of 50 to 80 wpm, some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm. "Hunt and peck" typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorised text and 27 WPM when copying text.

Go on, try it yourself, I used typeracer, and scored 35 WPM, first try, then timed myself writing the same text (so a slight advantage) as fast as I could by hand, focusing on speed over beauty, but still maintaining legibility, and scored ... 17 WPM. Pathetic, I know.

So to summarise: that's handwriting at 22 WPM, hunt & peck at 27 WPM (about the same) and between 50-120 WPM for touch-typists. So, if we don't teach our students how to touch-type they are in theory, after ten year sof 'hunt and pecking' at least no worse off than they would have been if we'd asked them to write it all by hand. Although research on cognition in relation to writing gives us some pause for thought when they politely highlight the fact that the hunting and pecking process effectively makes the cognitive process of writing far less efficient, as the resources which should be dedicated to composition are instead being dedicated to hunting for letters to peck. 

In other words, when you can touch-type, the cognitive load of writing and thinking at the same time are lessened and free up working memory for thinking—a bit like cycling a bicycle—once the effort required for remaining balanced, and changing gears et cetera are automatic, you can spend more time noticing/enjoying where you are going.  The same idea applies to things like decoding in reading via ‘sight words’, this frees thinking space for understanding instead of decoding.  The absence of effort in one frees cognitive space for the other…

So, the gains with touch-typing frees up cognitive space, and increases speed, with typing hovering in the range of double to triple the speed of handwriting. And of course none of this even considers arguably the most important element; digital text is capable of so much more than handwritten text.

Distinctive features of word processing that support creativity 

"We think that there are distinctive features of ICT that can support creativity and they can be described as follows: 'provisionality', 'interactivity', 'capacity', 'range', 'speed', 'accuracy', 'quality', 'automation', 'multi-modality', 'neutrality' and 'social credibility'."

Loveless A (2002) Literature Review in Creativity, New Technologies and Learning


"The provisionality of ICT enables users to make changes, try out alternatives and keep a 'trace' of the development of ideas. Interactivity engages users at a number of levels, through immediate and dynamic feedback. ICT demonstrates capacity and range in the ways in which it affords access to vast amounts of information locally and globally in different time zones and geographical places. The speed and automation ICT allows tasks of storing, transforming and displaying information to be carried out by the technologies, enabling users to read, observe, interrogate, interpret, analyse and synthesise information at higher levels. Quality can be recognised in the potential to present and publish work to a high standard of appearance and reproduction. Multimodality is reflected in the interaction between modes of text, image, sound, hyper textuality and non-familiarity..." p 94

Loveless, A., & Wegerif, R. (2004). Unlocking creativity with ICT. Unlocking Creativity: A Teacher's Guide to Creativity Across the Curriculum, 92.

Typing is Writing

Confession. I have believed for years that touch-typing is clearly useful, but not essential, why?

• a stubborn reluctance to commit to the discipline that learning this skill requires

• a possibly naïve expectation that keyboards will be go the way of the Walkman soon,

• the recent exponential improvement in the accessibility, reliability and accuracy of speech recognition tools like Apple Dictation.

However, I now realise...

• there are few, if any, life skills that can be learned in less than 3 months based on a commitment of 10-15 minutes a day that would literally reap benefits almost every day, for the rest of our lives, furthermore, with the plethora of online touch-typing tutorial tools it’s never been easier.

• keyboards (or similar) aren’t becoming obsolete any day soon, aside from the profound difficulties people face when thinking and speaking, as opposed thinking and typing, short of wearing a menacing helmet with sensors that allow the computer to recognise my thoughts (and who would really want that?), we are always going to require some sort of physical interface that we can interact with to be able to transmit our ideas into words.

• voice recognition tools lose their efficacy in a shared space, which as a teacher, and certainly for our students, is more than the case than not.

This is not an argument against handwriting, typing is also writing. Our choice, much like the difference between handwriting using print script or flowing cursive, is whether to become adept at typing or to resign ourselves to the mind numbing frustration of ‘hunting and pecking’. The keyboard is here to stay; our choice is to either master it, or to spend the rest of our lives wrestling with it.