Once, when I was teaching grade 8 ELA I had a bunch of students who really, really, REALLY disliked writing... but they had an extra ELA period (with another teacher) in the computer lab so I set up blogs for each and every one of them so that they would have to write (I talk a bit about them here). How did it go? It went ok... I must admit that some students were not responsible enough to have comments enabled or unmonitored, there was some plagiarizing, and there were a bunch of boring topics. BUT, this is not a story about any of that!
This is a story about how a student used the word "ovaries" continuously throughout his writing because he didn't know how to spell a word and just went with the first word that the spell check suggested. And that pretty much sums up the story actually... I don't recall what the word he was trying to spell actually was but it was hilarious but he decided ovaries was the correct word. So teach your students how to use spell check correctly, and if they really don't know if the word they are using is correct it only takes a minute to look up the definition of the word which would hopefully grant them more clarity.
