When reading To Keyboard or Not to Keyboard (Baugh, 1999), this week I was reminded of my own experience learning to type. I am dating myself a little bit, but we didn't start to learn keyboarding until seventh grade. It was an entire class period devoted to typing on typewriters (and, really, I am not THAT old!) I distinctly remember the frustration when the teacher taped a piece of paper over my hands so that I could not look at the letters. There was such a great compulsion to look under the paper!
I did learn to type. The keyboarding class was a good start. I learned home row and the proper finger for each key, but it wasn't really until college when I was forced to type all of the time that I got very good at it. A 45 minute class once a day without an engaging reason to be typing just didn't quite do the job!
The article made me ask myself, "How would this experience have been different if I had begun to learn keyboarding at a much younger age?" Baugh (1999) talks about pre-k/kindergarten keyboarding skills. I am going to begin informally talking about the keyboard when my daughters are sitting at the computer or learning a new letter. Not only because I think kids are on computers at much younger age than seventh grade, but because when they do get to the point where they need to learn to type and I think that process would be much easier to learn if the process started at a young age. Hopefully, they will not feel panic when someone puts a paper over their hands and says they cannot look, because they will have quite a bit of experience with a keyboard before they get to that point!
Did anyone have a similar experience to mine, or vastly different, when learning to type?
Reference
Baugh, I. M. (1999). To Keyboard or Not to Keyboard. Learning and Leading with Technology,
27(4), 28-31.
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I can't believe that you learned to type on a typewriter! It must have been a money issue within the school district you were in? I also didn't start keyboarding until 7th grade, but I really liked it! Our teacher never covered up our hands. My mom has always said that the reason I am a good typer is because I took piano lessons when I was younger for many years. I suppose that coule be! I do think that kids need to take keyboarding at a younger age than when we both started out.
ReplyDeleteBeth, I did too, learning typing officially from a typewriter and believe me it was a lot of work, which makes me appreciate the keyboard a lot more thinking back. :-) And yes, I'm that old!!!!
ReplyDeleteOne problem I encountered teaching the writing class was that it took students a lot longer to write on the computer than on paper because trying to find the English lettesr on keyboard seems to be a tough job for some of them, which they thought was a big distraction from writing. By the way, typing for Chinese is different. We use the same keyboard but the function of each button is different. This has affected greately on some of my students while they take the TOEFL ibt where everything has to get done on computers. Therefore, I think keyboarding should be included in L2 English learning process.
I did not learn how to type in school until 6th grade when you had to take a class on comouters and even then I could never get it becuase it was not engaging. I needed to type words not all that home row stuff. At home we did have a typing game but I liked the number part better so was always playing that part.
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