Tools of the trade spell-check

I decided to start with the video above, to illustrate an important point-spell check is not that hard to use! However, if you have been reading fanfics, online articles, and forum posts as long as I have then you will noctice that there are alot of people who do not get this. They will either type out their posts as fast as they can without care or go right into the middle of writing out the article without even trying to spell things correctly. I have even seen kids in sixth grade doing this excat thing when they are typing out their papers.

I wouldn't think that this was much of a problem if...the school computers didn't start off with the spell checker disabled. Making the user having to reactivate it. And why?

As I showed in the video above, it isn't that hard! Just go up to your tool bar and activate it or even use an Fkey. But nope, time and again I will find that one bad fan fic or post from a person who thinks that its ok to misspell or to make the worst grammar mistakes.

Look, the red line is your friend, it is meant to help you. So is the green line, it is meant to be there to offer assistance to make your writing better. I know it seem hard to do it on forums, though, but most I visit have a spell check option on there as well. Just click on it and you have most of the work done. Though I post this question, why do schools remove it?

Alternatives to typing

Ok, so before we explore in depth with what to do with the two pieces of tech and writiing...I think it is good that we talk about what to do if you have a disabilty that prevents you from typing. Particularly in the realms of sight and hand cordination.

     To get a little personal, the reason why I type so much and will find everything I can to do to advoid hand writing as much as possible is because I have horrible hand writing. I have been to physical threapist and they have yet to be able to fix it and the lessons never really took. Its why I try to use computers in my teaching, because I can not write and everything I would write on the board comes out looking like a mess. It is a personal problem that has haunted me for years and it is something that I know how to fix.

     That being said, I do know that there are people who are dealing with worse, some who do not even have hands or are parylized to the point where typing is not an option. For this, I do reconmend the speech to text function that is usually installed for free in Microsoft 7





    As seen in this video, Speech to text is a very useful tool and a common one that can be easy to use if you know what you are doing.  MY only problem is, sometimes when it comes to hearing what you are saying...it'll mess up badly. It is not always a problem, but one that comes up enough that it kind of gets annoying. Although, this maybe just dealing with how I talk, as I am quite the fast talker and sometimes my words can get jumbled up when I am talking.

    Another disability that concerns typing, is blindness. After all, you do need to at least see the keyboard to type and hear if you make a mistake. (A quite common fear for me as I love to read fanfics online.) There is a few things to help with this, such as a braille keyboard stickers or a few text to speech programs. This link here aslo demonstrates how some blind people get by with using the computer while they are disabled.

Week 1-How to start.

    Lets start with the basics of how ITN can help with my writing and in turn the basics of getting started with a piece. As you well know, no one write without a base to start from, you need pencil and paper in order to get anything down. The same could be said here, in order to start typing we need a word processor. Now, for me, I use two particular ones: Word, and Google docs. Lets look at both of them and see how well they work.

    Word is the most common of the group and most likely the first one that you have heard about when you started using a computer. In word, you have many options for formatting your text, changing the allignment, and to insert hyperlinks to a particular website that you might want. This was also my personal one that I got started with and though it is a classic, I can still say that it does have some small problems. Due to the fact that it recuires you save manually, there is a chance that you might forget to save when you close the program and thus lose all of your work. Too many bad memories with that, trust me. Another problem is that you would have to pay for it through office and this can be troubling if you just wanted a word processor without the excess material. It would also be troubling for the person who wants to get a computer on the cheap.

The second one that I use, and use more often lately is google docs through the use of drive. In order to best describe what it is and to better illustrate my points, here is a small video



Now, I have fallen in love with this service. It has all of the features of word and none of the expenses. I greatly enjoy the cheapness of the product, how it handles my typing speed, and so much more. I also love how the doc allows for others to join you in the writing of your material, allowing for people to help with editing or making collaberations that much easier.It also gives the writer a chance to make just as easy edits with an easy spell-check. The spell check also gives you the corrections for words, but also won't try to correct the words that are common in fandoms-such as Saiyan or other terms. If I had any real complaint with it is this, since you are working online with this you need an internet connection. To make it worse, if you lose the connection at anytime, you'll lose the ability to work on the product. Fortunatly, and this is another reason why I am a fan, is that docs has this tendancy to autosave everything for every edit. This means that whenever you type, you'll not have to worry about losing valuable work

Introduction: Why are you reading this?

     Greetings, if you are here then you must be curious as to why you are reading this and what is an experience. I am calling this blog an experience because this is all about my experiences in ITN and how it has benefitted me in one of my favorite hobbies: writing. It is also an experience on how I can use ITN to better my writing skills and to improve my own grammical mistakes. To best describe what type of discussion I hope to inspire, here is something that someone could use the word program for-



And this is a reading of a story that I hope that my writing can achieve with the help of tech and word processing