Using Technology in the GED Classroom

By Rochel Abrams

To compete in today’s workplace, future employees must feel comfortable working with a computer. However, many GED students have no access to computers outside the classrooms. This means that GED teachers must ensure that all students receive as much computer experience as possible.

A weekly essay is one good way to encourage students to work on the computer. Using a word processing system benefits students in several ways:

• Students will become comfortable using a computer
• Students will be able to save their work
• Students will be able to edit their work at a later time

Typing a weekly essay gives students the opportunity to learn such basic computer skills as opening and saving a document, keyboarding, and formatting. Students will also become accustomed to writing essays using computer software.

When students create essays on computer software, they can save them into a folder. This allows them to learn how to save and then open a file, making it easy for them to save and review their essays. This is important, because many students need to visually track their own progress. (Often, students do not feel comfortable writing. Having their essays saved makes it easy for them to see how their writing has improved over a period of time.)

Another benefit to using a computer to write essays is that students can edit their work without erasures, scratch-outs, or rewriting. Often students are hesitant to edit their work because it involves too much effort or they don’t want other students to see all their mistakes. When editing is done on the computer, mistakes can be corrected and text can be moved around without erasures, arrows or revisions. When students print out a copy, other students see a nice clean copy without “red marks” all over it. Also, while the students are correcting their mistakes, they are learning how to use the computer.

When students use computer software to write their weekly essays, they not only learn how to write an essay but learn valuable computer skills that they can use in school, at work, and in other life situations.