spell checking in activities

[Bastien]

Hi Carol,

"Carol Farlow Lerche" <cafl at msbit.com> writes:

> Please provide the pointers if you would be so kind.  

Will do, when I have it!

> English has too many words that don't follow rules, so if writing were deferred
> until spelling of each word could be perfect, young children would not be able
> to write substantive compositions until later grades.  No doubt other languages
> are taught differently.  

Spell-checking is just a possible feature of a software.  I expect such
a feature will only be useful for certain teaching contexts and methods.

For a given context in which we assume that the feature is relevant,
there are good and bad implementations.  For example, in order to teach
the correct spellings of words to a kid, I think MS-like spell-checkers
are bad.  

As an alternative, I suggest to use a very minimalistic spell-checker,
which will automatically replace typos by the correct spelling when the
replacement is 99% predictable.  Or something along this idea.

(I'm not arguing on how writing should be taught...)

-- 
 Bastien