How to Start Kids Typing on Keyboards Even if They’re To Young to Touch Type This video has some useful tips, tricks, and ideas to get children started keyboarding who may not be ready to touch type. This can be an activity children can do in the car, bus, subway, or waiting room. If you don’t have a device with a keyboard, you can find a picture of one, print it out and they can still practice the basic drills like these. Additionally, you’ll find that when you learn to touch type on the keyboard, touch typing with your thumbs transfers naturally.Ī kid can learn to type as soon as they have access to a device with a keyboard though it’s generally believed that they may not have the motor coordination or finger span to truly touch type until about seven or 8 years of age. Learning to touch type not only saves time, but it enables one to type while maintaining eye contact. Why not now? It’s great for hand-eye coordination, letter recognition, and it’s an effective way to share your thoughts and ideas in an authentic medium. With a one-semester typing program a student will usually be able to type about 30 words per minute and a second semester can as much as double the speed. If you like hard facts, here’s what this looks like broken down by words per minute with handwriting speed. When it comes to reproducing thoughts, keyboarding is a more efficient and effective way to produce information that is easily sharable allowing the expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage. If I was smart, I’d type it up on sticky labels and paste it on the sheet. I haven’t written by hand in more than five years, except for my signature and at the annoying doctors offices that are stuck in the past having me write the same information 500 times over and over. If you’re hung up on the lost art of handwriting, here’s some food for thought. With typing we are freed from the slowness of handwriting, finally allowing us to get our ideas down at the speed of thought. In academic terms this is called cognitive automaticity. Perhaps the most important reason to get kids typing is it helps get to the thinking faster. Also, typing can be fun! It’s like a race. Teaching children to touch type is a great skill to have early on that will save a tremendous amount of time later. I’m often asked, what about today? When should kids learn to type?Īs someone who learned to use an iTouch/iPhone from a three-year-old and an iPad from a six-year old, I’m keenly aware that kids can start using technology well enough to teach an innovation specialist very early. Now the words I put on the page come from my head to my fingers on a keyboard. Today, that’s replaced with a simple file download or cut and paste. I haven’t typed someone else’s words in more than a decade. Years later, I was very excited about the electric typewriter, then selectric typewriter which was faster with its typeball instead of those long long bars each with a letter hitting the page. Back then, typing meant taking something written somewhere else and then typing it on your own paper complete with erase tape, that you used on mistakes, and that bar that you hit to put the typing carriage back to where you started. I was 13 and I took the class from Miss Web, long before the Web was anything more than what spiders wove. The only useful class I remember taking in school was typing.
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