The impact of digital tools

En tekst av Victoria H. Olsen

Children are exposed to more and more digital tools in their everyday life. They use digital tools at home and at school. Some schools are even fully digital which means they use little to no books. The impact of this can in my personal opinion cause a lot of problems the older they get. Three out of ten pupils wrote bad or very bad based on a research project. (Berge, 2017). If they only learn how to write on a computer from an early age, acquiring the skill of handwriting later on might be difficult.

Writing training is something that is done from an early age, but today the digital tools have a bigger impact. I personally witnessed this impact during one of my internships. The pupils got an assignment where they were supposed to write a text about any holiday. The teacher informed us that due to dyslexia and difficulties with handwriting, some students were exempted from the traditional paper-and-pen approach. Some pupils wrote one whole page while others only wrote a couple of sentences. You could also see a big difference in the quality of the writing, how the word was written etc. You could see that some pupils wrote all- capital letters outside the lines, while others wrote inn small letters inside the lines. This is just one example of many. But still more and more pupils have problems with writing words and text by hand.

By promoting collaborative writing, we may help pupils who struggles with writing words and text by hand. By collaborative writing I do not mean solitary writing in personal notebooks, but a letter they write to others. They can organize with other schools, maybe from different parts of the country where they send letters to each other. Imagine your child come home from school and tell you they are writing letters with another child somewhere else in the country. With this the children might get more motivation from their writing and actually start to enjoy it. Maybe then we can fix the ongoing problem with the impact of digital tools.

 

References

Berge, K.L. (2017, 20.september). Kronikk: Vi må styrke skriveopplæringen i skolen. Forskning.no 

Statped .(2023) Veileder i skirveutvikling.