A couple years ago I bought a OLPC for my daughter who was four years old at the time. Recently she has shown interest in learning to type. I pulled out the OLPC and started up the word processor. She would practice typing but never saved any of her work. One day she asked how she could save her typing. I showed her (after figuring it out for myself first).
With my recent purchase of iPad and Apple’s wireless Bluetooth keyboard, my daughter has been practicing her typing on the iPad using Pages. She asked, “will it save my typing?”
“Yes, it’ll save it. You don’t have to do anything,” I said.
Think about that. Here’s a list of things that she and I didn’t have to do:
- I didn’t have to show her how to save a document.
- She didn’t have to worry about losing work.
- She didn’t think of a name for her document (Pages automatically assigned one)
- She didn’t have to understand file/folder structure and decide where to save the document.
All she has to do is to exit out of the Pages app when she is done. Pages is definitely kid-friendly. As adults we don’t have to worry about this because we never lose work because we forget to save and we never forget where we save a file.
