I had never thought about teaching keyboarding in my future classroom. I have thought about teaching many subjects, but keyboarding has not been one of them. I have realized through our discussions that it is important to teach it to students though because they will need this skill in their future education. I don't remember actually being taught though I just remember using my keyboarding skills and getting better along the way. I am sure that I was taught the skills through my keyboarding classes though and just didn't realize that I was learning it. I think that teachers can find a way to make it more fun for their students. The way I was taught was typing the combinations of letters from a book that we set up in front of our computer. I always thought that it was really boring. We never had much direct instruction either. Our teachers would just tell us what page to type and we would do it. When we finished we were able to play computer games, which was the best part.
I found out that it is important for students to utilize the skill in a meaningful way for them. For example, I became a fast typer because of MSN Messenger. I was practicing the skill without realizing it and became more accurate and faster. If teachers can make keyboarding exciting for students then they will improve their keyboarding skills without realizing it. Some of the examples that we talked about it class today seemed interesting. For example, I love the idea of the Chris Van Allsberg activity. I remember doing this activity in 378 and it was a lot of fun. If you have the publish their work though it is typing something that is meaningful, not just typing random letters, words and sentences. Another example that we did today that shows how to use keyboarding was the TitanPad writing activity. This is a great way to practice typing because students are typing their contributions to the book and aren't really focusing on typing the letters they are just applying the skill in an engaging way. I am glad we had this discussion in class because it will be something that I will be sure to think about now when I am teaching my own classroom.
I agree, I thought the TitanPad activity was really fun, and I think it would be really motivating in a lab setting like we did it today. If students had the opportunity to share what they had written with the entire class, it would be really fun as well. I thought that while the games were fun, I really cannot say that I really know where individual keys are on the keyboard anymore. I've typed without looking for so long that I rarely think about it and I often just type words without thinking about which keys I'm hitting to do it. It was interesting to see how much I struggled with what should have been a really simple activity.
ReplyDeleteI also never thought about teaching typing in class. I really feel that it should be a conversation in a methods class. I think most of us learned to type through instant messager. Is there a way to bring this into the classroom? I was thinking of setting up the Titanpad between two students and simple allow them to have a conversation. This would allow the teacher to monitor the conversation but allow the student to type whatever they want.
ReplyDeleteI feel that a lot of the time that we actually did work on keyboarding, it was spent on drill and practice. When students get bored with drill and practice they are going to be less likely to want to do keyboarding activities in the future. I think teachers should bring keyboarding into classroom and give students time to type their work using computer time schedules. I feel that if we were to bring in some keyboarding practice to the classroom instead of always going to a computer lab for drill and practice, that students would feel that typing is more meaningful and engaging.
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