Today in class made me think of keyboarding in education in a way I never had. I honestly just thought, well, if I learned it, so will my students. I never thought of the time and all the 'behind the scenes' thinking that goes into it. I agreed with both the pros and cons today in class. I walked out of class thinking, "well, should I or should I not introduce keyboarding at a young age?" I would be interested in talking to be previous teacher to see exactly how often we did keyboarding and if she felt like it was taking away from more direct instruction. My few memories of keyboarding were always positive experiences. I remember trying to be competitive with my friends. Today, I consider myself a pretty fast typer, not always accurate, but fairly fast.
It's time's like this, that I wish more schools were year round. We would be able to slowly introduce typing instead of trying to fit it all in in one semester. As a special education teacher, part of me, feels that it is more important to focus on typing in certain situations. Some students handwriting will never be legible, but if they're able to get their thoughts through typing, I would be willing to focus more time on keyboarding skills. I also really like the idea of dictation. I have seen it on my cell phone when texting, but didn't think about it in the classroom. I feel I would use if more for a time saver, but it could still be beneficial for students with special needs.
Overall, I feel keyboarding should be introduced, at minimum in 3rd grade. Even if students are doing it during free time, I think students need as much exposer as possible. A comment was said that keyboarding was not motivating. I think I would try to do a little competition of some sort to get my students motivated to learn to type correctly. I plan to continue to read about keyboarding in elementary classrooms to help make my decision.
I agree I think that keyboarding should be introduced at least by 3rd grade if not before. Keyboarding is a skill that students are going to need to have in their future education so they might as well learn it as early as they can. It is an important thing to teach, but I'm not sure if the methods for teaching it are the best way. For example, I don't think I learned all of my typing skills from school. I learned it by typing instant messages. I was introduced to it in school, but I was motivated to learn how to do it because I wanted to talk with my friends through messenger. This means that teachers need to find a motivating way to teach it.
ReplyDeleteI agree as well that keyboarding should be introduced by third grade, but I feel that teachers should make sure there is access to keyboards before this age. When I was student teaching in kindergarten, a student who had autism was able to remember my teacher's password for BookFlix and type it into the site so that he could watch a story. (To this day my teacher and I don't know how he figured out the password. He might have seen my teacher type the password in.) I was very impressed that he was able to remember the letters and type them on the computer. Looking back, I think it would have been really neat to spend some time with him to show him the typing tool in KidPix or other program so that he could draw and type his ideas on the computer.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the competition thing would be fun. I'm seeing, in my mind, hot air balloons moving up a bulletin board or something. I think it would be so fun for them to see how everyone is doing and see how they stack up. It would also be really motivating for them to move up in the ranks and work harder if there were a competition attached.
ReplyDeleteAmanda- that is really funny. One of our kids with autism would memorize his daily schedule, and as soon as he knew what day of the week it was, he would arrange his daily schedule on the Velcro strip by himself. It was amazing that even though he obviously knew his schedule, he really wanted to carry around his Velcro strip.