New research has shown that using abbreviated words such a “l8r”, “lol”, and the hundreds of other short forms is actually beneficial to both children’s spelling and literacy skills.

The research, carried out at the University of Coventry, involved children between the ages of 8 and 12. It found those kids that regularly sent/received text messages to have better literacy skills. This repeated use of text language tests their English skills and requires the learning of correct spellings. The study proposes that to create the short form word they need to understand and know the original too.

Read more at BBC News

My own kids often text and I’m not sure whether I agree with the research but I look forward to being proved wrong. Until then “C U l8r”!

January 23 celebrates National Handwriting Day. I admit my own handwriting has become worse as I have become more comfortable with a keyboard and screen than a pen and paper. But what about our kids? My own children prefer to type up their homework than write it. Is the art of handwriting to become a lost skill?

“Though computers and e-mail play an important role in our lives, nothing will ever replace the sincerity and individualism expressed through the handwritten word,” David H. Baker, WIMA’s Executive Director, is quoted as saying on the WIMA Web site.

For those interested in celebrating National Handwriting Day, TeacherVision offers downloadable activities for students in K-8.

As we increasingly turn to computers for writing purposes, is good handwriting still a skill that children need to learn?

Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen discusses the “We Tell Stories” project, which aimed to tell stories using innovative online formats. The project broadcast stories live online as authors wrote them and utilized tools like Twitter and Google Maps. —– Matt Locke of Channel 4 Education and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin Books discuss how hyper-connectivity, interactive media and the changing demands of 21st century audiences are transforming stories and storytelling.

I look forward to seeing more of this innovation.

Curtis Bonk, professor emeritus at Indiana University, focuses on the idea of technology as a way to have multiple perspectives on international matters and analyze data at a deeper level for school pupils. This short video discusses some ideas for using technology in the classroom to enhance a students understanding of a concept at a deeper and a global level. Transcript below.

Robin Good: I am receiving this idea that those kids and those pioneers among us pushing the envelope will be the models of this emerging revolution, but the resistance from the existing educational system is very strong.
Also what I noticed is that these so-called digital natives are not as schooled as they are painted to be. They are cool because they have those tools as natural tools in front of them, but most of the time they are clueless on the best use of these tools on themselves, out of the very easy superficial social tools that they start to learn right away.
Digital natives do not seem to get what are the possibilities in front of them because they do not really have models inside their educational institutions that help them think critically about the opportunities available to them. The education system also makes them think in ways quite opposite in the way of forming them as humans that can have value inside society, that are kind of opposite to the once being offered by those very technologies. I am having some conflicts with all that.
Curtis Bonk: Let’s think about the Flat Classrooms Project.
The Flat Classrooms Project is the only one discussed in my book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat book, Don Tapscott’s WIKINOMICS book and Growing Up Digital.
What they do in the flat classrooms, in Digiteen Project, they take a book like mine, or whatever book they might have, my blended book or whatever they have got, and they analyze the book. And in this case, these kids in secondary schools, work with other kids around the world to understand the technologies that make learning open. This semester they are using my book actually, The World is Open book. It is making them aware of what are the technologies for learning. Last year they looked at Growing Up Digital, the book from Don Tapscott, and they analyzed it across the world.
You are right, kids today have pretty savvy skills for their mobile devices, they can use them for chats and all this. But they are not for learning.
How do we transform the mobile devices or these synchronous conferencing tools?
In the Flat Classrooms Project they use Ning to form groups with other kids around the world, wikis to summarize the book across cultures, video conferencing like this to discuss what they have learned and do peer interaction. They use other kinds of tools like Twitter, microblogging and blogs. How can that one-off project become the norm?
How can those synchronous as well as asynchronous collaborative technologies push all through all schools? This is the power of technology I have been talking about since 1987. I think that video conference like this can let kids stand in each others shoes. They can see perspectives. That to me can change the whole teaching and learning arena. We have to pushing the global head, international head for perspective taking.
So I understand people in Italy better, which I do not admittedly, or people in Pakistan or some other places around the world. To me this is the most powerful way to use technology. It is to do cross-cultural collaboration like the ePals projects and others, there is something called the IEARN Project. That will get kids in K-12 schools thinking about collaboration, teaming, these digital skills that you are talking about to critically analyze data. Not just accept what they see, but to analyze it with their peer groups. When they see a group in Italy critiquing a document that they thought was great, they will see that they really were not thinking about the credibility of the sources, the quality of the resources.
When I have done any international collaboration with my students, with my teachers, they see that once we go to Finland, Peru or Korea, those students are analyzing the data in a different way, and they are opened up to the fact that they are really not going as in-depth as they need to go. I really think that international collaboration pushes us up to ego-centric points of view to multiple perspectives. That is one way of using technology that can help with this digital teen issue.

What a simple concepts for using technology in a way that opens children up to the powerful way in which these technologies can be used for collaborative learning at a global level.