This week Ms. Putman and I introduced a new keyboarding program to all current fourth and fifth grade students. The program is called Keyboarding for Kids, from Ellsworth Publishing. We introduced the program now so that students who want (or need) to work on improving their keyboarding skills can use the program over the summer to help improve their typing speed and accuracy before the new school year starts.
The program can be accessed from any computer, Mac or PC, as long as it has internet access and a web browser. Simply go to KeyboardingOnline.com, and log in with the school name: “univschool”. Students should know their personal login names.
This is not homework! Nobody is required to work on this program over the summer. However, if you would like to become a faster and more accurate typist, I recommend that you spend some time working on your keyboarding this summer. I would like to see rising fifth grade students complete the first five lessons by the first day of school. For rising sixth graders, completing the first 23 lessons is a good goal.
At school, I sometimes cover a student’s hands with a cardboard box that I’ve chopped up with scissors so that it fits over the keyboard but leaves room for kid’s hands to reach in and type. Students find it very disconcerting at first to type with their hands covered, but they very quickly adapt to touch-typing without looking at their hands, and speed and accuracy rates improve very quickly. Look around at home and see if you can find a box that you could use for this.
Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns regarding this new program. I would be happy to email the handout that goes along with Keyboarding for Kids to parents or students who may have misplaced the sheet I passed out in class last week.
Posted on June 9th, 2009 by Ms. Ruthie Hansen
Filed under: Uncategorized
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