Day 9 - The Writing Process

What happens when you try to write with your left hand? Unless you are left handed or ambidextrous, you may produce something that looks similar to what I produced below:

Writing with my right hand is easy for me, I don't even have to think about it. Writing the short sentence above was automatic. However, when I tried to write that short sentence with my left hand, it required so many more elements, and it was stressful. It took me longer to get the page in the right spot, I had exerted a lot of pressure on the page, it took me awhile to get the right grip, I really had to focus and tune everything else out, and it took me about 4 times as long to produce. This is just a narrow glimpse of how a child with writing difficulty may feel when trying to produce written output. It was quite insightful! As with the reading process, I had never considered the skills that are necessary to write. There are various skills that you need before you even pick up the pencil! Over the next 2 days, we are creating a comprhesive blog about the writing process, so stay tuned for that! It will include apps, resources, an overview of the writing process, plus much more!

One program we talked about today was CoWriter which is a word prediction program. I really liked it so I thought I would share this video:

Another thought to consider: Remediation (re-teaching using different strategies) vs. compensation (technology to help compensate). How do we know what assistive technology to use? How do we know when to stop the remediation process and start using compensatory resources? To answer this question, we really need to understand every component of the reading and writing process.