Class act

Posted on 3 Jul 2002 at 16:55

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A computer can be a great aid to learning if used in the right way, especially as the burden of homework, exams and expectations increases. Janet Swift seeks out the right tools for school

Coursework is an increasingly important component of exams both at school and university. In this summer's GCSE and AS-level exams, girls again outperformed boys; could it simply be that they put more effort into their homework? Even at primary school pupils are asked to hand in project work, and the range and frequency of such homework simply increases as you go through your school career. Having a PC at home can help your kids plan, carry out and produce homework across the range of academic subjects with the minimum of problems and the maximum of effectiveness.
Writing tools
A word processor is an important tool and you don't necessarily need anything out of the ordinary. There is an argument for using the same one at home that your child uses at school, particularly for younger children. On the other hand, meeting the challenge of using more than one application could be considered a useful skill.
There are three word processors aimed specifically at primary school children. Black Cat Numbers, Words and Pictures caters for the very youngest in the classroom and is therefore seriously limited in functionality. Children at home would soon grow out of it.
Both Textease and Granada Learning's Primary Writer, which is available with a single-user licence for home use, are suitable for children from age six to 12 and beyond. The features that set them apart from standard office word processors are 'resource banks' of pictures, sounds and video clips and speech facilities. Both Primary Writer and Textease can read selected text, while you can also set options in Textease to articulate individual letters, words and sentences as they are entered.
Speak and spell
All the major office suites now include voice recognition, but this facility hasn't proved a very convincing option for most users. It requires much training and even then it can be easily confused by extraneous noises and poor diction. However, the speech engine also has the useful ability to read aloud the text that is stored in the computer. A text-to-speech facility can be very helpful to young children and to people with learning difficulties. Dyslexia is thought to affect between four and five percent of the population, and three times as many boys as girls need additional help. Hearing what they have written read back to them is likely to be both helpful and motivating to people with dyslexia, and there are several options for adding this facility to a word processor.
Windows XP will include the Microsoft Narrator to read text in WordPad and Notepad and other text-to-speech engines can be downloaded from the web. EasyOffice Premium, features text-to-speech as well as voice recognition. The free, downloadable version includes a capable word processor and it can create, load and save files in rich text format (RTF) to be exchanged with other word processors.
Users who have Windows applications and want more help with reading and writing difficulties may like to try Read and Write 5 from textHelp. This combines a text reader with a pronunciation tutor, a spellchecker, a word prediction facility to correct misspelled or unfinished words and a thesaurus. All are designed for students who need more help than is available in regular word processors.
For students and secondary school pupils the vital component of a word processor is its spellchecker. Even if you are good at spelling you are likely to mistype words occasionally. An interactive facility will normally be sufficient: word processors such as Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect underline an unrecognised word and provide a list of suggestions when you right-click on it. StarWriter, the word processor component of StarOffice, includes this facility, is available for free download from the internet (or on CD at a modest cost) and runs equally well under Windows and Linux.