He also rates Living Books highly because its bright, colourful characters come to life on the screen and interact with pupils and encourages them to read. This is important because books now have to compete with TV, video games and video machines. Computers can also help teachers improve small children's perceptual skills and are a wonderful diagnostic tool and aid in remedial work. For instance, a diagnostic program may pinpoint that a child learning to read is mispronouncing a vowel. The child can then work through a remedial program .
Computers can also take the drudgery out of school work.
For instance, the traditional way of teaching punctuation is to get pupils to write down set sentences and fill in the correct punctuation marks. Using the correct software, pupils can now punctuate sentences on the screen . Hutcheson says pupils leave the school confident in computer technology. Most schools would love to introduce computers but are constrained by cost. Hutcheson points out that with the introduction of the business skills levy next year all companies will have to invest in some form of training.