iLearn Technology

What it is: This blogging alliance has been expanding my knowledge of great tools for the classroom faster than I can keep up with!  Recently, I found two more excellent ways for students to practice typing from @2sparkley’s blog.  The first is reminiscent of the popular Rock Band, called UpBeat.  Students can choose a song and level of difficulty.  They must type the letters as they appear to keep the song going smoothly.  This had my students absolutely SILENT while they practiced typing.  They were so involved and having a great time trying to keep up.  The way the game is set up, really challenges kids to touch type.  They can’t very easily keep up without touch typing!  Students stopped by my lab the morning after I introduced the site to tell me how many combos they were able to get.  The second typing site is called Typing Chef. In this game students try to type words as they float past on bubbles.  The goal is to type the word on the bubble before it pops. It gets increasingly harder as more bubbles float up and speed up.

How to integrate UpBeat and Typing Chef into the classroom: Typing can be a subject that elicits groans.  Adding these games in the mix as additional opportunities for practice is sure to make students happy to practice.  I try to keep typing to a minimal in my classroom.  With only 35 minutes once a week with students, I don’t want to spend all of our time practicing typing. I have the kids do the majority of typing practice at home.  Once a year (sometimes twice) I hold a big typing Olympics competition.  Students can earn a free break dress code day (we have uniforms), this is great incentive…like gold to them!  The fastest boy and girl touch typist in each class get the break dress code certificate.  I make a huge deal about how athletes who participate in the Olympics have to train hard.  Practice doesn’t always make perfect but we are aiming for practice makes permanant (good habits).  I created the following website for my students to use in their training www.typing.weebly.com.  Upbeat and Typing Chef have both been added to the games page of my Typing website.

Tips: UpBeat is a Mini-clip game. This site is often blocked at schools, make sure it is unblocked at your school before you plan on using it in class.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using UpBeat and Typing Chef in your classroom.

This year I am teaching 3rd- 5th grade only.  My remaining time is spent helping teachers to integrate technology in their classrooms effectively and supporting our new Promethean boards.  I see my students once a week for 35 minutes.  Any of you that teach a specials class know that at least 5 minutes of class is spent getting students ready to learn after the hallway transition.  This leaves me with 30 minutes with my students.  In that 30 minutes I have to teach a lesson and give students an opportunity to practice it on the computer.  In a school year I see my students a total of 24 times (that is if we never have a snow day, or lose a day due to field trips or special events).  I love teaching my students how to use technology as a tool to help them learn.  I do not want to spend my time with them typing.  Although typing is a valuable skill for them to learn, there is SO much more than our brand new iMacs can do.  My other hang up with spending computer class focused on typing is that I still only see my students 24 times in a school year.  Even if we spent every class typing, I don’t feel like this is adequate time to really learn and build touch typing skills.

My solution was to come up with a typing competition that will take one class period.  I call it the Typing Olympics.  I make a BIG deal out of this day.  We have opening ceremonies, olympic fanfare music, and even paper doves.  Students compete against each other to find out who is the fastest touch typist with the greatest accuracy in each class.  There are two gold winners, one boy and one girl.  The winners receive a gold medal in the closing ceremonies along with a break dresscode pass (these are like gold to our students!).  There are also silver and bronze winners who receive medals.  The students know that the Typing Olympics happens in the spring.  We talk in class extensively about how hard athletes like Michael Phelps have to train before the Olympics.  At this point I give students the goal to train for our Typing Olympics.  This year I decided to create a special website for the training and created a Typing Training Club.  Students can visit the site for links to websites that will help build their typing skills.  There is also a blog page where I give students suggestions about which keys to practice each week building up to the Typing Olympics.  This helps break down practice into a manageable skill each week.  We type in class one day prior to the Olympics.  The rest is up to them.  For my students, a break dress code day is enough incentive to practice typing on their own time.  Obviously, some students will take this more seriously than others.  For our situation, I think this is our best option for building touch typing skills.  I have some students who can type at 53 WPM and some at 8 WPM, but at least we have learned more during the year than just touch typing.  I suspect I would get similar results even if we used the 24 classes in the year for typing practice.

What are you doing at your school to build touch typing skills?

What it is: Typing Masters has a great typing game that your students can play for free to increase their typing skills.  PacMan Typing gives students the familiar Pac Man game, instead of moving Pac Man with the arrow keys, students have to type letters to make him move.  The faster students can type, the higher their score will be.

How to integrate Pac Man Typing into the classroom: Pac Man Typing is a great motivating typing game.  Students will want to build up their touch typing skills to master this game.  Hold a friendly competition in your class to see who can get high score in Pac Man Typing.  This is another site that will build student typing skills through a fun game.

Tips: I learned about Pac Man Typing this morning on Twitter from @SheilaT, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…my PLN is the best!

Related Resources: Keyboard Climber, Typing Web,  Novel Games- Flash,  eLearning,  Dance Mat Typing

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Pac Man Typing in your classroom.

What it is: Keyboarding is a necessary evil in the computer classroom.  I say this because truly mastering touch typing takes practice, a lot of it.  However, I don’t want to spend all my class time in the computer lab teaching kids to type.  There is SO much more that our brand new iMacs can do.  To use them as typewriters feels ridiculous.  Combine that with my 35 minutes once a week with students and keyboarding really becomes a necessary evil.  In my classroom, I focus on typing practice very little.  I encourage my students to practice keyboarding at home with fun online typing games.  Keyboard Climber is one of these games.  It is a fun little game that helps students build those touch typing skills in or out of the classroom.  In Keyboard Climber, the goal is to help a monkey climb up a tree and score bananas by typing letters.  If the student types the incorrect letter, a coconut falls on the monkey’s head and he falls down to a lower level.  There is fun music and sound effects that accompany the game, kids love it, I find it a bit too monotonous.  The only other thing that I don’t love about the game is that all of the letters are displayed as capital letters.  However, students never have to actually type a capital letter (with shift or caps lock).

How to integrate Keyboard Climber into the classroom: Keyboard Climber is a fun little game to help students practice typing.  Use it in the computer classroom as a short warm up and see how many points students can accumulate in a set amount of time.  Hopefully this number will increase throughout the year.  Encourage students to play Keyboard Climber at home to practice typing.  I have students take a screen shot of their highest level and points to post on one of my bulletin boards.

Tips: I learned about Keyboard Climber from @techfacil, thanks for the tip Julie!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Keyboard Climber in your classroom.

What it is: Toy Theater is a fun place for students to practice math, reading, art, and music through puzzle type games.  Toy Theater encourages students in k-4 to get their problem solving brain cells working as they explore and discover the games in Toy Theater.  In the art section, students can animate their own cartoon character, put on a puppet show, or make a Matisse.  In the music section, students can make music with the Composer, interact with notes with The Music Maker, or go on a pounding mission with the Drum Beats, you will have miniature maestros in no time.  In Math students can practice math facts with flippy flashcards, or feeding Freddy, and take a math practice test to put those math skills to the test.  In the reading section students can enjoy a good joke, play with words with a sliding crossword puzzle (highly entertaining for teachers too), write their own road sign, or practice their typing skills.  In the puzzle section students brains gt put to the limit with tic tac toe and memory games.  In the playset section, students can create their very own virtual diorama about cars, sea creatures, plant, insects, ships, characters, aircraft, blocks, dinosaurs, and buildings.

How to integrate Toy Theater into the classroom: Toy Theater is a great website to use as a learning center in your classroom.  The short, easy to play games are perfect for short center activities.  I love the puzzle type environment that encourages problem solving and bends the brain a little.  The playset universe would be a great section to use with an interactive whiteboard, students could take turns creating a ‘universe’ to showcase learning on a topic such as ocean, plants, insects, dinosaurs, geometry, etc.  Students can work together to show what they know together.  After students create a playset, have them pull out a writing journal and journal about the playset the class created.  Being a computer teacher I am constantly looking for fun ways to let students practice typing skills.  In the read section you will find a game called letter fall, letter blocks fall from the sky, students have to type the letter before 5 blocks can stack up. There are multiple speeds to make the game a challenge for your different typing levels.  In the computer lab setting, see who can last the longest before 5 letter blocks stack up (there is a timer at the bottom of the screen).  

Tips:  This is a great site to send your students to when they finish work early and are asking “what can I do now?”  

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Toy Theater  in your classroom.

Over the past week I have been re-vamping my websites.  Tenkely.org is a site that I created for my students to use.  I have pages for first through fifth grade with links to all of the sites that we use in class throughout the year.  I also have a page for parents about how my classroom runs and tips for keeping kids safe online.   The teacher site for tenkely.org  has also been completely re-done.  I added TONS of new goodies for teachers.  Obviously, I created these sites with my students and colleagues in mind but I hope that they are a source of inspiration for you too!  I am already keeping tally of links that aren’t working right so if you run across any, leave a comment so I can get them fixed up.

What it is: Typing Web is an awesome website I ran across yesterday. It is a free to use typing tutor, tester, and also includes games. Typing Web tracks students progress and provides a place for them to practice their most frequently mis-typed letters. Students can personalize their Typing Web site by choosing a “skin” to decorate the typing practice page. I don’t know about you, but as soon as my students can personalize anything they are hooked! The web based software makes it possible for students to practice typing from anywhere they have an Internet connected computer. There is also a NEW free iPhone or iPod Touch Typing Tutor for those that are so lucky .

How to integrate Typing Web into your curriculum: Typing Web is best used in a computer lab setting where students can have blocks of time set aside for typing practice. You can also set up a practice center in your classroom where students can take turns practicing their typing skills. Because Typing Web is web based students can practice at home too!

Tips: Typing web has a school version where teachers have more control over the individual student set up as well as data collection. The school version is subscription based.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Typing Web in your classroom.

What it is: Novel Games provides free Flash games that can be embedded on any website. There is a long list of games that you can embed from World capitals game, typing games, to Sudoku and other great math games. Search the list of games, you are sure to find many that fit your needs. Because you can embed the games on your website, students can easily access the games from school and home.

How to integrate Novel Games into your curriculum: There is such a variety of high quality, FUN, educational games that integrating them into your curriculum will be varied as well. An example of how I am using the Novel Games in my classroom can be found at www.typing.weebly.com. My students are learning how to keyboard. Because I don’t want to spend my year teaching only keyboarding I offered my students a challenge. Practice typing at home and come participate in a Typing Olympics (where only touch typing is allowed) and you won’t have to spend your computer time learning to touch type. I am at a private school so the best prize that can be offered is a break dress code day. The fastest touch typer’s in each class will get to break dress code on a day when no one else does. Students can practice typing using these practice games I have provided. The games are perfect as part of the Typing Olympics because they give a final score…easy to tell who the winners are! Most of the games are perfect for practicing a skill and will inevitability get kids doing homework voluntarily because they are so much fun to play.

Tips: Don’t have your own website to embed the flash games? Create a free one today using a site like www.weebly.com. To embed a player simply highlight and copy the code from Novel games and paste in an HTML editor in a site like Weebly. Make sure that your students have the latest Flash player installed or the games won’t work properly.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Novel Games in your classroom.

What it is: Do-a-rain-deer is a reindeer orchestra. Students “squash” the noses of the reindeer or type the numbers on their shirts to play different musical notes. Students can free play and make up their own songs or choose a Christmas song to play with the site guiding them.

How to integrate Do-a-rain-deer into the classroom: Do-a-rain-deer is a fun site that students will enjoy interacting with. This is a great Christmas/winter activity because of the play along songs. The site is more than just fun and games though, use Do-a-rain-deer to practice touch typing numbers. It is a great number touch type motivator because students want to play the songs at the speed they are meant to be heard. This site could also be used in a music class as a fun, easy activity during the busy Christmas pageant season!

Tips: As your students learn to touch type the numbers, invite them to put on a “concert” for fellow classmates.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Do-a-rain-deer in your classroom.