Zoey Blevins is one of the many students at Brookwood Elementary at Hamilton City School District who are learning proper typing techniques using a Google App called Typing Club, one of the myriad online tools Angela Vocke uses in her fifth and sixth grade computer class.
If you’re of a certain age, you might remember taking your first typing class in high school.
You’d park in front of a humming electric typewriter, fingers on “asdf” and “jkl;” while you tapped out “quick brown fox” sentences and pretend business letters, a bottle of whiteout nearby.
The letters are still on the same keys—but other than that, 21st century typing class is way different.
At Brookwood Elementary School in Hamilton, for example, students start learning their way around a keyboard in first grade, using a Google App called Typing Club. The app has 100 levels, starting with basic exercises such as learning to type three rows of lowercase j’s and f’s and building up to typing full paragraphs, complete with capital letters, punctuation, and symbols.
The program, which highlights each letter you type in red or green (depending on your accuracy), clocks your speed, counts your mistakes, and compares your stats to other members of this new-age qwerty club.
Brookwood Teacher and Technology Learning Consultant Angela Vocke says her typing students really get into it, and she likes how easy the app makes it to monitor student performance. Like a news crawl on CNN, each student’s speed and accuracy stream in a live feed to her SMART Board, allowing her to give kudos and coaching to students in real time. Even the students give each other verbal feedback.
She says her fifth and sixth graders have phone keypad skills but have developed habits—like typing only with thumbs—that can make traditional keyboarding a challenge. And while she’s concerned more about accuracy and speed than form and technique, she does emphasize a couple of basics:
“My thing is, mostly keeping the eyes up. You’ve gotta learn to find those keys in your memory,“ Mrs. Vocke says. “And you have to have two hands on the computer.”
Even though they practice typing for only about five minutes at the beginning of class a few times a week, some of these students are really mastering the skill, she says. A couple of sixth grader are typing between 44 and 62 words per minute with 99 and 100 percent accuracy. “Those two girls?” she says. “I know they weren’t looking at their keyboards.”
This skill is part of the larger foundation of technology skills that will help these students succeed in high school, college, and in the work force, Mrs. Vocke says. “In today’s society, there’s no job in which you’re not going to be exposed to some kind of technology.” And being proficient at the keyboard will make using technology that much easier.
Mrs. Vocke’s students are enthusiastic about the skills they’re learning through Typing Club.
“I love Typing Club!” says Zoe Blevins. “Before Typing Club, I had to look at the keys, and now I can type fast.”
And Claire Cashdollar says she thinks this skill definitely will be valuable when she’s older: “I think Typing Club will help me type papers for college faster.”
In addition to Typing Club, Mrs. Vocke integrates such tools as Kahn Academy for online math lessons,RazKids for interactive reading assignments, and Movenote, which allows students to combine electronic documents and video.
These technology resources not only “bring a lot of the topics we teach to life,” Mrs. Vocke says, they truly transform the learning process, allowing kids to easily perform tasks that would otherwise be impractical or impossible.
For example, to prepare for a recent science fair, they practiced their presentations by recording themselves using Movenote.
Not only could they stop and start as many times as they needed to “until it was perfect in their minds,” all 30 students could be recording at the same time, Mrs. Vocke says. “In the old way, all 30 kids would sit there and watch one kid at a time perform. You don’t have time for 30 kids to practice that way.”
In all of her tech integration efforts, Mrs. Vocke says her goal is to make sure the technology is a tool for reaching an educational outcome, not something that’s distinct from the rest of the academic work.
“I definitely think students need the technology, and it needs to be integrated in a way that it’s not completely separated into something else,” she says. “It goes along with reading and science and math.”