BlogWalker

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Teaching Keyboarding- a rationale + free sites

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“What’s the use of having a machine capable of working at lightning speed if the information it needs trickles in like molasses in January?” (from “The Most Crucial Computing Skill” by Erik Sandberg-Diment/ Science Digest/ January/ 1984)

underwoodkeyboard.jpgI learned to type in high school – on a typewriter, not a computer. Touch typing is still at the top of my list of “Useful Things I Learned in High School” list. When computers entered my life, I quickly transferred the skill to a better tool that pretty quickly rekindled my love for writing (which I had lost somewhere in my middle school years).

I was recently invited by a wonderful 8th grade English teacher to help start her students on a blogging project, The Outsiders. Most of the students knew the keyboard by touch, or something close to touch. But for the few who did not yet have this skill, it was truly like “molasses in January.”

I was glad to have stumbled upon The Tech Savvy Educator‘s post on Online Typing Tools, a great resource for sites that have computers, but minimal budgets for software (or the students are tired of the same K-8 keyboarding program;-). And a quick Google search returned links and links of white papers and district tech standards such as http://www.wcasd.net/supervisors/elementary/K-5_keyboarding.pdf to add some research to the mix.

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