Should students be taught typing instead of writing?
Technology and handwriting in schools
It’s not a surprise to know that half the tasks
primary school children do at school every day contains writing; this isn’t done
by using technology. While schools try to offer technology in many of our
classrooms access is limited and issues with software, hardware and security
and persistent. Subsequently, most of the writing our children do in primary
schools at least, is handwritten.
I would like to know more about the attitude of
teachers to handwriting and how they use it in schools today. I also want to
know what parents of school aged children feel about what is happening for
their children in terms of handwriting and keyboarding.
What
research so far says about handwriting?
Indeed,
it is essential when children are learning their letters. They learn the name
of the letters, the sounds they make in different words, how the letters looks
and significantly how to form or create the shape of the letters. There are
also important connections here to how we remember.
Even adults remember more of what they write by
hand than what they write on keyboard or tablets.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also teach
children how to use keyboards, though there is some research to suggest that
keyboard skills should build on from the skills of handwriting. “It is more
effective to teach keyboarding skills in Year 5 or later”, Stevenson and Just,(2014).
As far I believe that simply typing is not a
skill for students in the academic feature, but the mixture of handwriting and
keyboarding are necessary to achieve the learning goals.
