This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) sought to address the challenge of optimizing handwriting instructional practices and assessment methods for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at St. Andrew's School (SAS). SAS is an Episcopal, co-educational boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. With 18 years of experience as the primary…

This article describes a multisensory presentation and response system for enhancing the spelling ability of dyslexic children. The unique aspect of MAGICSpell is its system of finger-letter associations and simplified keyboard configuration. Sixteen 10- and 11-year-old dyslexic students practiced the finger-letter associations via various typing…

Classroom teachers sometimes struggle trying to find time during the typical school day to provide the writing instruction students need to be successful. This study examined 29 fifth through twelfth grade classroom teachers' survey responses about their perception of the effectiveness of using an online blogging tool, Kidblog, to plan and provide…

Fourth graders with learning disabilities in transcription (handwriting and spelling), LD-TD, and without LD-TD (non-LD), were compared on three writing tasks (letters, sentences, and essays), which differed by level of language, when writing by pen and by keyboard. The two groups did not differ significantly in Verbal IQ but did in handwriting,…

Children with spelling difficulties are limited in their participation in all written school activities. We aimed to investigate the influence of word-prediction as a tool on spelling accuracy and typing speed. To this end, we selected 80 Grade 4-6 children with spelling difficulties in a school for special needs to participate in a research…