typing olympics

Typing Practice

February 2, 2010February 2, 2010Kelly Tenkely13 Comments2875 views

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.

December 8, 2009Kelly Tenkely4 Comments3092 views

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?