Advances in Technology-based Education: towards a Knowledge Based Society

This research's motivation was to compare the use of educational programs by computer against the traditional education. There have been 80 students from 1 st to 4 th grade of elementary school participating in this research, divided by grade, in experimental groups and control groups, aiming to evaluate the use of educational software against the traditional text production in writing activities and to analyze the effect of a training program and education level on the subject's performance. The procedure included initial-final evaluations and used specific writing software to conduct the training to experimental groups. The control groups participated into the writing training using the teachers' traditional strategies to produce texts. The statistical data analysis revealed that the Writing Program using the computer was significantly superior to the conventional one when implementing the creative writing; the conventional one showed to be more effective to develop the linguistic structure in the production of texts. 1. Introduction The electronic ways of reading and writing set off that fundamental transformation are being processed in creating texts in the communication strategies and demand new ways of conceiving reading and writing as acquisition, skill and competence. One of the basic functions at school is to promote competent readers and writers, and changes in the instruction and in the educational technology may occur to attend the students' new needs, students that now read, seek information, study, write and communicate themselves across electronic documents and must be, therefore, competent in computer and information literacy [1,7,8,914]. Specifically, the use of computers to implement the writing production and the text processing are, according to Scrimshaw [15], the most common programs used at school because the resources that they dispose, stimulate students to accomplish cooperative and creative activities in writing, helping them since the planning until the final text edition. The correction and edition easiness, associated with graphic resources and text processing organizers, have been considered by the researches accomplished with these programs as evidence that the students' writing production that use text processing is better, both in quality and in quantity, as compared to those that produce texts in paper-pencil [7,9]. Owston and Wideman [13], evaluating the text processors use for three years, have studied two students' groups writing production that attended different schools as the computers access and educational proposals, but similar as to the considered population, formation and teachers' number, physical structure and localization. The students collected all …