Does spelling count?

Absolutely. Standard English must be preached and practiced.
Kids no more expect to use all their text tricks than they expect to wear bathing suits to class. All this pandering is not good for the soul.
ON THE OTHER HAND, it might be fun--and instructive--to sometimes let them go wild and crazy with the non-standard stuff. That gets it out of their systems. Later, and this is the good part, you ask them to reflect on the pros and cons of different vernaculars. That is real critical thinking.

I believe that spelling is very essential to student's writing. Although technology greatly helps us these days, we can not rely solely on it. What about when we go to write a note to our boss in a meeting and we do not know how to spell a word? That looks bad on our part.
In free writes and journals spelling should not count, but in formal papers or research reports spelling should be judged.

I subscribe to the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy! Absolutely demand correct English, count off for spelling, pursue grammar. BUT...design activities where nothing but text speak is used. Let kids reply to you if they understand a taught concept :), did not quite get it :(, or have questions ??? All done with NO phones on campus, of course! Students will soon discover that although texting is quick and has its place, there is a time and place for it. It is difficult to communicate at a deeper level with IDK, or LOL. Great writing needs a full vocabulary.

I think it is nice for students to be able te use modern spelling for 'text messaging' if they want to. However, they should know the difference between that and formal writing.
They should be taught that these are two separate languages.

I think it's very important for all people to learn to write appropriately for their audience. Text-speak and emoticons are fine when a person is writing a personal communication to someone with whom they are familiar. However, should a writer's audience be a prospective employer, a business contact or someone similar, proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar are critical, if the writer wants to be taken seriously. Student's need to learn proper writing skills in school and, since that is the only place they are going to learn them, I believe schools should always require proper writing, unless the exercise is specifically presented as either recreation or as a chance for students to learn the correlations between emoticons/text-speak and the proper writing they are being used to replace. Supporting the idea that proper writing is an outdated and obsolete practice isn't helping the students, IMHO :-)

I agree with most of you. You must have proper grammar, punctuation, spelling, all of it. In order to make it interesting throw in a few well-designed activities where they can use texting language. The practical side of me thinks of how awful it would be to sort through all of that nonsense when it came time for grading.

Spelling may be important, but usage is a lot more subtle and a lot more compelling. When you use "very essential" it's worse than redundant - how could anything be "sort of essential" or "essentially essential" and still make any sense.

Not to be too tacky, but be a lot more careful about your adverbs - words like "greatly" and "solely" flutter like the leaves of a poplar in the breeze and distract from your point. That point - that spelling is important, particularly in important works, since people expect important words to show in important ways - is, perhaps, not very subtle.

It might be framed more directly: say what you mean, and leave it at that. It's hard to spell badly, incidentally, when you write on a computer, and nobody uses typewriters anymore. Most important papers can be self-corrected with any common word processor. It may take an afternoon to figure that out, but, Katie-the-teacher could simplify her correcting of papers to run them through a word processor self-correcting program.

Keep it Simple...S.

Back in the dark ages, before computers and smart phones, I was an avid letter writer. As a teen-ager, when I wrote letters I dotted my i's with hearts, used multiple exclamation points, drew happy and sad faces and so on. Kind of like the hard copy version of emoticons. My English teachers simply explained to me that when I was writing to my friends it was perfectly fine to write like that but a formal paper for school shouldn't include such things. I think the argument still stands.

Can, for many, be a flash and snap. In online conversations, for example, my response to such simple explanations is LOL. That, I'm sure, is not your intention, so it's wise to specify to whom, when, and under what circumstances such "explanations" involve examples, insights, comparisons, and identities. Multiple explanation points are sometimes important in online communications, for example!!! and might be seen as rude in a formal paper intending a slower, more circumspect response. Yet in third grade, that response has substantially less circumspection than in grad school, and the deliberate intention is probably - unless AP reaches farther than I'd ever expect - more measured. It is in sharing those measures that a teacher "teaches," but the most memorable methods are rarely "simple explanations." Beware keeping simple THAT simple, for yet another ironic example.

Joe, not sure I understand your response. The point I was trying to make was that it was easy for me as a young teen-ager to understand there was a difference between the type of writing I used in corresponding with friends and the type of writing required for school papers once it was pointed out to me. My suggestion is that one could make the same argument today about the difference between texting, etc. and writing for school papers.