The students consider it simply standard practice to get their ideas down in the form of notes and drafts, until they have sufficient material to warrant downloading to the desktop computers for revision and editing. There is no possibility of printing out a first draft, without at least going through the effort of transferring the rough draft to the desktop computer. The students are eager to use the keyboards and show no reluctance about then taking their work to the next stage of rewriting. In relation to the second question posed in the introduction, the study being carried out by Siegel and Bukowiecki may extend our understanding of the effects of these technologies. Inevitably, there are a few drawbacks.
Students can only see four lines of what they are writing at a time.
Cursor functions are a bit slow, and, although there are very basic edit functions and spell checking, very little revision can realistically be done on these machines. Batteries do run down and need replacing or recharging. On the whole, these are minor problems. More important is the need to provide training for teachers that will foster the most effective uses of these devices. The full report of the research by Siegel and Bukowiecki will appear in the Fall 1999 issue of the Currents in Literacy .