I don't think I agree with everything in Baugh's article on keyboarding. I could not believe the expectations he had for kindergarteners in keyboarding skills! Maybe I'm just being a huge skeptic, but I think those expectations are unrealistic for such young kids. I am all for students learning keyboarding skills, but I don't think at kindergarten they are developmentally ready to. I know I didn't learn keyboarding until 5th grade and even though I had computer experience before that, it didn't take me long to abandon my hunt and peck strategy and start using home row keys. I know computers and typing are an even bigger part of our society now then when I was in elementary school and so it would make sense that keyboarding would be taught earlier than 5th grade. I talked to a friend of mine who is a teacher and she said the students in her grade start keyboarding in 3rd grade. To me that seems like a reasonable age to start teaching keyboarding. My belief that kindergarten is too young to teach keyboarding is completely unsupported by research; it's just my personal belief. I'm excited to get other's opinions on this topic and to talk more about it in class.
I also had a couple random thoughts this week. Two of the articles I recently finished reading gave me a couple great ideas for incorporating technology with writing. I forgot how easily Inspiration can tie in with reading. During the rainforest unit we teach in 1st grade, I have my students write a paragraph about a rainforest animal and I could use Inspiration to help my students organize their writing. I also thought of using our projector at school that is hooked up to our laptop to do shared writing with. The students could see our writing easier, plus I can type faster than I write to keep the pace going as my students are brainstorming. I'm sure lots of people are already using this for their shared writing, but it was a new idea for me!
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Great ideas shared! We will talk about keyboarding more in class but I do think one effective strategy to use at an early age for children is to get them to use their right and left hands. They can do that! And in the end, it would probably be very useful! Great job with using Inspiration - it will be interesting to see how students do. Maybe you could post an example to your blog! Make sure you take the name off!
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