Teaching Keyboarding to Elementary Children

I posed the following question to the members of my personal learning network (PLN).

Advice Requested

I received lots of good advice and suggested resources. I wanted to share the information hoping that others would find it helpful, too.

Here are the responses from my Plurk buddies…

Typing Advice from Plurk Buddies 01

Typing Advice from Plurk Buddies 02

…and these are the replies from my Twitter friends.

Typing Advice from Tweet Friends 02

Typing Advice from Tweet Friends 01

Please Share
I invite you to please share your ideas, teaching strategies and resources, too. You can post a text, audio or video reply in the comments to this post or you can send me a message via Plurk and Twitter.

Together we all learn more.

Published by

Clif

Clif Mims is a Christian, husband, father, teacher, cancer warrior, and fan of the Mississippi State Bulldogs and Memphis Grizzlies.

One thought on “Teaching Keyboarding to Elementary Children”

  1. Thanks for the new resources. I will add them to a wiki I keep for teaching elementary keyboarding.
    http://learntotype.wikispaces.com/Strategies

    1) Many teachers think computer programs can teach kids to type. (They can help differentiate instructions, but mostly kids need good modeling and encouragement of the proper technique) along with an opportunity to spend 30 hours or acquiring the body memory needed to internalize the location of the keys.

    http://www.schools.utah.gov/ate/keyboarding/Articles/Bartholome.htm

    Often lab aides or elementary teachers are given the tasks of teaching keyboarding without any training on how one does that. Some assume the program installed at your school does most of the work and correct papers or check email while kids are typing. Nothing works better than the human touch of reinforcement as students proceed through the lessons of a typing program. Minor adjustment to their ‘technique’ helps them get better and encourages them to work on technique because they know someone is noticing.

    2) If you want free keyboarding software that you can install on any computer, try TYPEFASTER. I would strongly suggest staying away from Tux Type as a tool to learn to type. It is fine for letter recognition levels, but does NOT teach kids to type. As a matter of fact, I found that students backslide tremedously when we introduce certain ‘game’ like programs that act like a video game where letters descend on you. This is not a normal pattern tha the body takes when keyboarding. Letters do not fall at you from the sky. I found that students take on a video game mentality and stop using the home row keys and will do anything to “pass” that level, including foregoing all proper techniques they learned. So beware of programs that might look cute to the untrained eye but that are not developmentally appropriate or pedagogically sound.

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