#Type to learn 4.com how to#
#Type to learn 4.com full#

Track progress: You may be amazed at how quickly students progress once they have some regular typing sessions.Involve parents: It can be a great idea to tell parents about the resources you’re using to learn keyboarding at school and encourage students to use them at home too.

blogging, emailing, typing up Google Docs etc. Have ongoing authentic avenues for typing: Even if you’re only formally covering keyboarding once a week, you’ll want to be giving the students more regular opportunities to practise in an authentic way, e.g.Include tuition and practice: Give your students a mix of formal tuition in typing (like finger placement) as well as practice time.Some people prefer to do a few minutes each day. Schedule time each week: I used to try to slot in a 30 minute session each week for working on keyboarding.Linda Yollis’ students practise their typing on an old set of old AlphaSmarts! You don’t have to have the newest computers either. Find devices to use: If you don’t have enough computers for everyone, maybe typing practice can be a station in a rotation.I do think the skill of typing is so important that we can’t chance the fact that students will learn themselves. While it’s not a huge study with only 82 votes, you can see that a significant proportion of people who can touch type did learn without formal lessons. I learnt “by doing” while others learnt through formal lessons, however, we both got to the same place.Ī few years back I ran a poll on my blog asking people how they became proficient at touch typing. The results were interesting. How people get to the point of being able to touch type is something that interests me. That being said, I can touch type very well, yet was self taught. So here’s my point: a basic standard of keyboarding skills is required and it doesn’t always come naturally. Surely it would be better for professionals like these to be spending more time listening and relating to you while considering your medical situation, rather than trying to hunt for letters? You’d think if typing came “naturally” then they would have picked up a better method (just sharing a general analogy here we know many doctors are proficient typists). Is the same true for typing? I don’t think so.Įxample: I’ve sat in front of a number of doctors who are looking up and down from the keyboard to their screen as they slowly type notes with two fingers. It might be messy but most adults are not super slow writers. The fact is though, people generally end up gaining some sort of fluency with handwriting.

#Type to learn 4.com how to#

We want our students to be thinking about how to convey their ideas, not wondering where the letter “s” is. Using a hunt and peck method requires a lot of brainpower. When it comes to typing, it’s also clear that students need some skills in this area.

handwriting stamina including whether assessments should be handwritten.

whether joined/cursive writing should be taught.

the standard of handwriting expected and the time spent teaching/enforcing this.

Often the debate around handwriting concerns: There is a lot of research that stresses the importance of picking up a pencil and learning to write in the traditional way. Hopefully students are learning to write from the time they enter school. The worst case scenario is not being able to do either particularly well! Whatever the future holds, it would be hard to deny that students need a basic level of competence with both handwriting and typing. Now typing is more than just finding the home row on a standard qwerty keyboard it might also mean using predictive text, voice technology software, or virtual keyboards.

#Type to learn 4.com full#

Some of you might remember classrooms full of typewriters or bulky computers when you were at school. You need to be able to pick up a pen to jot down your shopping list, while also being able to put together an email in a reasonable length of time. In this digital age where people are communicating via computers, tablets, phones, as well as in traditional means, fluency and adaptation are key. Sometimes this is for an audience, and other times it’s just for your own benefit. When you create a written text, you want to be able to clearly transfer the thoughts from your head onto paper or a screen. While there are a lot of opinions on the details, it really comes down to being able to communicate your ideas clearly. Typing and handwriting can be fairly contentious issues in education.