Keyboarding

Type written communication has come a long way. I remember my grandmother typing on an old type writer when I was a child and believing that she was incredibly smart because of how agile she was in her fingers' moving over the keys. Even since I took my freshman keyboarding course, good typing skills have become even more easy to attain due to the design of current keyboards and the use of technology on a daily basis in our world today.

The first program I tried was the Speed Typing Online test. It was extremely educational in the reality of my theoretical typing abilities. I scored a 96% accuracy rate with 52 words per minute. The program was extremely easy to use and was very straight forward in how you were to be evaluated. I believe this tool would be useful in a classroom setting to quickly evaluate student typing abilities. Also, this program offered difficulty in words and passages selected for timed typing. I was timed on a passage from both the Odyssey and Beowulf. Overall, I found this tool helpful and interesting.

The second program I tried was on the free online typing games site. I did the game called typing trek and this program was not as easy to figure out how to play. The game is set up into a grid and you collect targets on the grid by typing the letter the target is highlighted upon. Overall, this was much more difficult for me than just speed typing, however, it did utilize a different skill set. I believe this game would be useful to those visual spatial learners that work well with images. Also, the grid aspect would be useful for mathematical minds too! Even though it required more thought, this was a great challenge.

The third program I looked at was typing.madefun.net. This program was great because it looked at several different aspects of typing including: theory of typing, the study of fingering, training exercises, tracking for strokes, tracking for false beats and erroneous key strokes, evaluation of words per minute and more. I chose to do an exercise in the letter a. Therefore, I was typing things like abs, aabab,ababa act, etc. Overall, it seems like gibberish, however,when given real words with those key stokes within them, I was able to perform at a higher proficiency because of the practice with the smaller key stroke practice. This program would be very helpful for beginning typist and would allow for progression and quick feedback.

These programs truly have come a long way since the idea of typewritten communication was developed. I love old type writers, but recognize how efficient the keyboard truly is for our ever increasing speedy society. These tools will be useful for me as an educator because the technology and keyboarding world is the one in which we currently live and my students will continue to develop in a world of increasing technological advancement. I will have to prepare them to compete for jobs and to be fully capable of living in this brave new world, therefore this education activity was very helpful.