I normally write by typing in my laptop. One peculiarity of this matter is that I prefer to lesson plan using pen and paper. Many colleagues of mine have digitized their teaching calendar and their daily plans into their laptops. However I still prefer to use a physical planning book with written notes and short lesson plans inside of them. I believe the reason why I choose to do this is the ease of access and the ability to change the text quickly. I also think that having it physically in front of me helps with visualizing what the week will look like in my classroom.

While completing this manual script task, I used an erasable pen that I recently purchased from Japan. One of the main challenges with using a pen especially as a teacher is that I find if I make a mistake while marking a student’s work, the solution of using white-out always turns out to look messy and unprofessional. After discovering erasable pens that doesn’t ruin the paper, I have been using them ever since in place of regular pens. For this task I simply erased my mistakes and written over them by using this innovative pen. Although erasing mistakes were easy enough, it still is more work compared to a simple backspace key press on a laptop.

I feel that the most significant differences between writing by hand and using my laptop are the speed and all the tools a word processing software provides on a laptop. Writing the manual script task by hand took about 20 minutes. I believe I could’ve written the same story on my laptop in about 10 minutes. I also think my writing got messier as time went on, mainly due to my forearm getting tired and me rushing to finish the story. If I wrote the same story on my laptop, I could’ve used tools for spell check and formatting such as formatting my lists by using bullet points. For those reasons I prefer to use my laptop for writing.