Speeeelling. A thing of the past?

I caught a segment on the Early Show last month that addressed teachers’ concern with the texting that students are engaged in.  They expressed worry because texting appears to affect the students’ ability to spell correctly.  Of course, we all know that proper texting does not require us to spell words correctly.
Teachers are seeing the effects on students’ work, particularly when they are writing compositions and their primary concern is how the students will perform in college on exams if they need to write a response to a question, write business letters or resumes if they can’t spell correctly.
Excel and Word have spell check, but what will happen if they need to write a letter without the use of a computer? Is texting really hurting our students?