Word Processing is a program where students can write essays, book reviews, create newspapers, and publish fliers. While some people think that all they have to do is hit the spell check key, it is still as involved as writing as ever been. Word processing does not make writing easier and anyone who has ever turned in a paper and received a rough copy back that looked like it had been in a gun fight knows this. There are many tools that help improve papers and make it easier to manipulate the text, but it is not making the thought process easier. The student should still have to write an outline to gather and organize their thoughts and then put "pen to paper" or type up their essay. Word processing allows you to underline, bold, italicize and even highlight the text and this looks nicer than handwriting an essay with chicken scratch. This process is even being used in elementary schools, leaving high school teachers anxious to find more demanding activities for their students. One example is writing an essay. This may sound simple to a high school student but one way for a teacher to make it more complex would be to have the student create a graphic organizer as an outline for their essay first. A high school student may be challenged by having to do extensive research from various sources, that they need to cite, for the essay. These are various steps that can be included in order to add some extra "jumps" for advanced students. Another activity for middle school or high school students would be to create a brochure for a country. If it is a Spanish 2 class, it would be beneficial to have the students locate information and pictures to use word processing to craft a brochure to turn in. A word document helps the students to be creative. Individual students can use the highlighting tool or the font size tool to place emphasis to parts of their brochure, or add titles to their papers. The needs of a student are addressed through the spell check tool that can help them learn reviewing techniques as well as explain to them what is wrong with a sentence grammatically. While Word does not always catch all grammar errors, the students have a chance to look over their work. Also the student can nurse his/her creativity through special fonts or colors within their text.
Another program that can help students organize their information is a spreadsheet, which deals with subject labels and numbers within those subjects. Students could use spreadsheet programs to collect information about the weather such as how cold it was in the month of December and then using those numbers to calculate an average for each week. Also the students could count the number of blue/red/orange/yellow M&Ms in a back and then use a spreadsheet to calculate the percentage of each color from the bag. This can all be done with the use of formulas. A visual aid for this data collected and relationships shown could be a pie graph for the percentages of M&Ms in a bag and a bar graph could be used to show the averages per week for the temperature for the month of December. I think it would be possible to create an interactive model if you give the students a spreadsheet with formulas already in place and all they have to do is input the numbers and then interpret the data. For the example of M&Ms you could have a spread sheet that has the colors and the formula to calculate the percentages, then the students could go through and count the M&Ms and input that number into the spreadsheet and even add a graph. Then the students could interpret that there were more blue M&Ms than red ones or vice versa.
Both of these programs would be great for the manipulating of text and numbers. I'm not quite sure how I, as a Spanish teacher would have the students use them, but I'm bound to find that resource if not in this class then throughout my teaching career from other sources.
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