Thursday, March 11, 2010
   
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Keyboarding for Primary


alt The following is an email about a method of keyboarding sent to me by Ian Jukes (www.ianjukes.com). I found it food for thought. I like the idea of having keyboard templates on the desktop for students to use.
Click here to download a keyboard template that you can run off for your students.

 Briefly, there have been in excess of 2000 studies done on the impact of keyboarding instruction, some dating back to the late 1800's (I have a stack of them somewhere at home.) The research conclusively shows that teaching children keyboarding has a significant positive impact upon many aspects of language, including understanding of grammatical structure, spelling, punctuation and even handwriting skills.

Our experience is that most kids are not physically or language capable to learn formalized keyboarding until grade 3. Initially, we want young children to learn "keyboard relativity" which means that we want them to learn the relative position of the keys on the keyboard. We use a strategy based on Marilyn Ferguson's Brain Mind research where we photocopy keyboards, divide the keyboard into left and right hand, and sometimes, develop color schemes - (i.e. space bar level as brown keys for earth, next row as green keys for grass, next row as yellow keys for flowers, and the top row as blue keys for sky) and then we help the kids develop neural patterns by laminating the keyboard, and placing it in the upper left corner of the student's desk. We then ask teachers to practice sequence skills - alphabetical, reverse alphabetical, new words, etc - for 5 minutes twice a day. Even if they don't do any practice, because of the position of the keyboard on the upper left edge of the student's visual field (which is where you should look while you repeat a phrase or name that you want to memorize), we learned that within a short period of time (a couple of weeks), the students memorize the relative positions of the keyboard. Again, we do not teach formalized keyboarding until at least grade 3, because we find that students have neither the language skills or the physical skills to learn formal keyboarding

From grade 3 up, we aim to have the students keyboarding at one and a half times their printing or handwriting rate. Typically that's 5 to 8 wpm for a grade 3 and 20 to 25 wpm for a grade 6. We actually measure their printing/handwriting speed (just as you would keyboarding speed) before we begin teaching them to keyboard. We do not use keyboarding software like Mavis Beacon, Typing Tutor, of Slam Dunk Keyboarding, we use a word processor (so that they can learn the keyboard and basic word processing skills at the same time) - after teaching the home keys, we don't teach more than four keys at a time (and preferably two) and we have the students writing words and sentences from the very beginning - our aim is to have them reach the goal of 1.5 times their handwriting speed on the alphabetic keys within 6 hours of training - and we set this as our goal because we believe in the principals of payback - that if we are going to take time from a time limited environment, students need to gain a payback, that allows them to communicate quickly and accurately - we set it up so that the kids spend no more than 15 minutes focusing on keyboarding  and we view it as performing the same function as stretching does before exercise.

The lessons are driven by the teacher - with the teacher calling out letter patterns that focus on develop neural linguistic patterns inside the students's heads - if you get a chance, take a look at the keyboarding modules for TechWorks (by Teacher Created Materials) - this model was developed from our "Elementary Keyboarding" model. It uses a word processor, and introduces kids to keyboarding the way we teach kids to warm  up in the gym. The teaching materials are all set out - as kids come into the class, there is high energy (Latin or Carribbean) instrumental music playing - the kids sit down at their stations and begin to warm up by reviewing the letters, words, and sentences that they were working on last time - this typically happens for about 5 minutes.

Next the two new letters are introduced and we ask the students to do Neural Linguistic Programming (mind mapping) - we ask them to close their eyes and move their fingers back and forth between the letters - for example, I will call out fg fg fg fg (for about 20 seconds) then gf gf gf gf gf then fgf fgf fgf fgf  then gfg gfg gfg gfg then gff gff gff gff gff gff gff then ffg ffg ffg ffg ffg and so on, then jh jh jh jh jh then hj hj hj hj hj hj then jhj jhj jhj jhj jhj jhj and so on then gh gh gh gh then ghg ghg then hgh, then ghh, then hgg, and so on - after about 3 to 5 minutes of this, they move on to the exercises that incorporate the new letters into new words and sentences.

As I said, we play instrumental up tempo music (like Santana, jazz fusion or Carribean) to energize the kids - and we create a 15 minute tape that has a bong or bell every minute for the 15 minutes so that students can take speed tests any time they want - we ask the students to print out what they have been working on and we save it to a file - there's a lot more details to this, but that, in essence is the assumptions based on research and observation.

Beyond this, the research also tells us that if there is not follow-up in the form of word processing practice, that 60 to 70% of the speed will be lost within 3 weeks - we also do not have our students transcribe (i.e. copy handwritten text) but want them to compose at the computer - and we absolutely stress the 5 stage writing process that emphasizes editing, proofing and publishing.
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