Spellcheckers in Education

I love spellcheckers! I use them often when composing emails, writing lesson plans, and doing some of graduate course work. I encourage my students and kids to use them as well. My youngest daughter loves to write stories and uses spellchecker all the time when she is working on a project.

One of the things I have noticed in the computer labs at the high school I teach at is students getting frustrated because the computers often say the students are misspelling science terminology that is not in the spellchecker dictionary. Students do not always realize that the spellchecker is a program made by a human being who may not have actually entered in the word they are trying to use which makes the computer think it is misspelled. The students often think that computers are never 'wrong'. Students need to be taught that they can make spelling errors that the computer thinks is correct too. Students should be taught how spellcheckers should be used, their limitations, and how to add words to the dictionary. "Spell checkers simply compare words to a dictionary of words, and the wrong use of a correctly spelled word cannot be detected (spell checker)."

I feel that spellcheckers are very useful but they should not replace the skill of being a good speller. It is a shame that cursive handwriting has fallen to the wayside as more people are using keyboards. I have several students in high school that cannot write in cursive. I hear it is not even taught in elementary school anymore. It has become obsolete. I am hoping good spelling does not follow the same path. But unfortunately, I learned spellcheckers are allowed on some state mandated high stakes testing (Melton 2010). I can see the pros and cons with this. Pros would be that there are less mistakes and poor keyboarding skills are not being assessed. The cons are that students can become too reliant on this technology that they do not put forth much effort in strengthening their spelling skills or understanding the importance of knowing how to spell words correctly. According to the comments on the article about state testing, it seems as though the public also has mixed feelings on this issue.

References

Melton, K. (2010, December 15). Oregon will allow students to use spell check on state writing tests in 2011.OregonLive.com. Retrieved January 15, 2012, from www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ss

spell checker. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12th, 2012, from http://computer.yourdictionary.com/spell-checker

UltraDumb. (2010, December 15).UltraDumb. Retrieved January 16, 2012, from http://ultradumb.blogspot.com/