In the digital age, writing by hand is important

Just found this interesting:
How writing by hand makes kids smarter is an interesting article about why it is important children learn to write.  Here are some reasons listed:

*important for brain development and cognition — helping kids hone fine motor skills and learn to express and generate ideas.
*Writing by hand can get ideas out faster
*Writing increases neural activity
*Good handwriting makes you seem smarter

Interestingly someone points out in the comments that children with dsylexia do NOT write faster by hand though, and it appears to be different for different people as well.  At least for me, it depends on the type of writing, different things work better in different formats. 

Tech Savy kids

I ran into an interesting example of how my kids are affected by growing up with technology that didn't exist when I was a kid. Leanna was looking for the Grease Megamix song to play (we use an online playlist for songs) and couldn't find it. I was busy loading the dishwasher and couldn't come right away to help her find it. She got impatient and figured out how to find it anyway. She typed "megamixs greas" and ended up on youtube with a megamix video. Pretty cool, but a little bit scary. She could easily end up on a very bad site while searching for something completely innocent. But I was impressed because I've never showed her how to do a search like that.

We didn't have a home computer until I was in 11th grade. We bought one from my Aunt and Uncle who had a business selling them. My uncle had a computer in his house way before anyone I'd ever known. Had to be early to mid eighties. (Livingston st.)
We set it up on the third floor. I remember them showing us how to use the computer mouse. It felt really strange the first time I tried it, it was jumping all over the place and I had to learn how to control it. My Uncle was impatient with us, he'd been using them for a long time already by then. We played card games on it and used it for typing letters and school essays. In high school we had a computer lab we'd occasionally visit with Macintosh apple computers. In my senior year I took a course called computer skills. It was frightfully easy. Much of it is useless now, we did stuff like learning the F1, F2,etc. keys. There were no computer mouses in our lab. I think the earliest time I used a computer in school was in 5th grade, some computers visited our school for two weeks. We got to visit them once or twice. In middle school I remember doing stuff in DOS in an upstairs computer lab. My kids will read that one day and have no idea what I'm talking about. Everything printed out on that paper with the holes on both edges that you had to rip off. My kids will have such a different experience in that respect.


I've purposely not let the kids do a lot with the computer. I know a lot of people make a big deal out of teaching them as early as possible, but I figure I'd rather they play and use their imaginations more while they're young. It's not like it's all that difficult to learn, they'll catch up easily, especially since they watch me doing it all the time. Leanna's had the most computer use, she's the oldest and I hadn't really formulated my theory yet before she started using it. But even then I tried to limit the time she was on it. I think research backs me up too-it shows that after using the computer for reading on a regular basis you tend to have more difficulty reading regular books, your attention span is shortened. I know I can personally attest to that. A child spending a lot of regular time on the computer in the world of instant clicking and jumping from site to site, refreshing the page, etc. etc., well, that has to affect how you learn to think. Leanna's computer use has skyrocketed since she got into webkinz (one of the reasons I didn't jump on that bandwagon immediately), but I've been using it as a reward lately. Generally she only does it on a Friday night when I go out with my sister. And lately some of that time is spend with Justin and/or Timothy playing games. I can live with that. It's just weird to think about how much has changed in such a short period of time.

The prez will be using the internet

"I wouldn't be surprised if Barack Obama starts doing a weekly YouTube video and also fireside chats for the 21st century by allowing people to filter up questions to him that he might answer."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/10/obama.wired/index.html