A keyboard curriculum for K-8

K-8 Keyboard Curriculum: The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week

You may think it impossible to find an effective keyboarding curriculum for the skimpy forty-five minutes a week you can devote to keyboarding. You teach what you can, but it always seems to be the same lessons—hands on home row, good posture, eyes on the copy. You wonder if it’s making a difference, or if it matters.

Yes, it does and there is a way. It requires a plan, faithfully executed, with your eye relentlessly on the goal, but if you commit, it works. In this book, The Essential Guide to Teaching Keyboarding in 45 Minutes a Week: a K-8 Curriculum, I’ll share a unique keyboarding curriculum for K-8 that I’ve seen work on thousands of students. The book includes:

• A summary of the literature
• Answers to the most-asked questions like ‘Can youngers learn to keyboard—and should they?’
• The importance of the teacher to early keyboarders

The K-8 curriculum includes a lot more variety than keyboard exercises on installed software.  Here’s a rundown of the pieces used:

• Keyboarding software (yes, you do need repetition)
• Online keyboarding websites
• Age-appropriate use of hand covers
• Quarterly speed/accuracy quizzes
• Quarterly blank keyboarding quizzes
• Monthly homework
• Wall charts to support learning and display evidence of success
• Grading based on student improvement, not conformity to class norms

You’ll learn practical strategies on how to blend these pieces, each added at the right time, to teach the keyboarding skills required for today’s classroom.

Each lesson includes:

• Overview
• Objectives and steps
• Best Practices
• Extensions
• Trouble-shooting
• Where to get lesson help

When will it be shipped?

Digital:  within 24 hours
Print:     7-9 days

Price?

Digital:  $25.95
Print:     $29.95
Print/Digital combo:   $50.31

Need more information? Click here.

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Q:  My students are learning to use Powerpoint for presentations. They’ll stand in front of the class and the slideshow will play behind them. We want it to go automatically without requiring them to click the mouse or push the space bar. How do we do that?

A: Presentations are a great skill to teach students. I applaud you on this. Auto-forward isn’t difficult:

• go to Transition on the menu bar
• go to Timing on the right side
• Leave ‘on mouse click’ selected (in case you as the teacher need to move it forward automatically. I’ve had students mistakenly put five minutes on a slide instead of five seconds and we would sit waiting forever if I didn’t do the mouse click)
• set the timer to serve the needs of the slide. This will require students to practice before presenting so they can put the correct time in. A good default of 5-10 seconds.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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What I did on my summer vacation (click to see original)

UPDATE

Are you going on road trips? Are you playing with your children, seeing friends you forgot existed, or engaging in retail therapy?

If I have time in between what I HAVE to do, I’ll join you. It might be a virtual trip, but we’ll make it happen.

Here’s what’s on my plate (so far) this summer of 2012:

1. Attending ISTE 2012. It’s in my backyard this summer–San Diego.
   
2. Attending training my school signed me up for on UbD, our new grading program (forgot the name), and robotics. One of the training sessions comes with a free lunch.
   
3. Editing a K-6 technology curriculum and a keyboard book for Structured Learning (a great publisher of edtech resources for the classroom)
4. Working on a tech thriller I hope to finish and get off to publishers. Of course it has lots of cutting edge technology in it and a quirky AI named Otto.
   
5. Picking the brains of my two children. One works in cybercom for the Navy; the other the Signal Corps for the Army. Most of the stuff they can’t tell me, but I love hearing what they can.
6. Working with tech teachers at my local school district on a technology curriculum for their K-6 classes.
7. Presenting at several schools on tech ed topics. If you’re interested in working with me on that, please contact me at this link.
8. Consulting with a Denver school district online to train their new tech teachers in what to teach in their computer labs next year.
9. Getting back to my inquisitive, curious roots. I used to spend hours figuring out how to solve problems, find solutions, determine what made something tick. Now, I’m too busy. I can feel the rift in my spirit, my sapped energy, my fuzzy brain. This summer, I’m getting back to that. Here’s my promise:

For the next six weeks, when I see something techie I don’t understand, I’ll stop and ask the essential questions:

“How do you learn that?”

“How do you know that’s true?”

“How would you find out why?”

This sounds fun, doesn’t it? I know, computer geeks and their toys. Sometimes, I think we tech teachers picked our profession because we couldn’t stand the excitement of accounting. This summer, it’s more about the cerebral challenge, the mental mayhem I can cause if I figure everything out. 

I’m ready.

What are you doing this summer? Can I join you?

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between the school bell’s chimes or the struggling budget of an underfunded program.

Now, education can be found anywhere, by collaborating with students in Kenya or Skyping with an author in Sweden or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on a class project. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders, available 24/7 from wherever students and teachers find an internet connection.

This vast landscape of resources is available digitally, freely, and equitably, but before children begin the cerebral trek through the online world, they must learn to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This conversation used to focus on limiting access to the internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) that students would be discouraged from using this infinite and fascinating resource.

It didn’t work.

Best practices now suggest that instead of protecting students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent in the use of the internet.

This 70-page text (click for a peek inside) is your guide to what our children must know at what age to thrive in the community called the internet. It’s a roadmap for blending all the pieces into a cohesive, effective student-directed cyber-learning experience that accomplishes ISTE’s general goals to:

• Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology
• Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity
• Demonstrate personal responsibility for lifelong learning
• Exhibit leadership for digital citizenship

Each grade level includes 3-8 lessons with a hands-on project for each lesson. That’s 46 lessons and 46 projects–a full year of instruction for K-6 in non-sequential order so it fits nicely into your school schedule or current technology curriculum, with a project for each topic. Here’s a schedule of what topics are covered at which grade level. Some start in kindergarten and are reinforced each year. Others, we wait until students have the maturity to understand the concepts:

You also get nine pages of digital citizenship links–over a hundred–as resources.

Can I see the Table of Contents?

Absolutely. Here’s a complete list of each lesson in each grade-level:

Price:

Print:    $29.99 + p&h

Digital: $21.99 + p&h

Combo: $46.99 + p&h

To order, click here.

Digital delivery within 24 hours. Print delivery–expect 4-7 days

Want more information? Check out the slideshow at the bottom. I have some of my favorite posters there.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

students type between 1-3 pages at a sitting without giving up from boredom, frustration, fatigue. To do that requires a knowledge of where the keys are on the keyb oard and what habits faciliate speedy, accurate typing.

It doesn’t have to be rote drills, drudgery. There are a lot of options that make it fun. Here are 32. I think they’ll find a few they like:

1. ABCYa–Keyboard challenge—grade level
2. Alphabet rain game
3. Barracuda game
4. Big Brown Bear
5. Bubbles game
6. Dance Mat Typing
7. Finger jig practice game
8. Free typing tutor
9. GoodTyping.com
10. Keyboard lessons—16—video, etc
11. Keyboard practice—quick start
12. Keyboarding practice
13. Keyboarding resources listed
14. Keyboarding—games
15. Keyboarding—lessons
16. Keyboarding—more lessons
17. Keyboarding—must sign up, but free
18. Keyboarding—quick start
19. Keyboarding—speed quiz
20. Keybr–Online practice
21. Krazy keyboarding for kids
22. NitroTyping
23. Online keyboarding course
24. Online typing lessons — more
25. Sensalang typing and quizzes
26. Touch Typing Progressive Program
27. TuxTyping
28. Typing Club
29. Typing Defense—fun word practice
30. TypingTest.com
31. TypingWeb.com—a graduated course
32. Web Institute Keyboarding for Kids

To sign up for the upcoming Summer (virtual) Keyboarding class, click here.

Need a curriculum for your classroom? Click here.

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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• Common Core Standards
• ISTE Standards 
• essential question
• big idea
• materials required
• vocabulary used
• problem solving for lesson
• time required to complete
• teacher preparation required
• steps to accomplish goals
• assessment strategies
• troubleshooting
• how to extend learning
• additional resources
• examples, grading rubrics

Units include:

• Digital Citizenship
• Digital Tools
• Excel Assessment
• Gamification of Ed.
• Google Earth
• Graphics
• Keyboarding
• Logical thinking
• Pre-Programming
• Problem Solving
• Robotics
• Search/Research
• Visual Learning
• Web Comm. Tools
• Word Assessment

Sound good? Here’s where to purchase:

Publisher’s website

Teachers Pay Teachers

Site Licenses–if you want these Common Core lessons available in all classrooms,  across all platforms (iPads, desktops, laptops, more) for one low price

As a technology teacher or IT coordinator or computer specialist (or all of the above), you need as much time as you can get and more than you have during the school year to stay afloat of what’s happening in the tech ed field. The list of changes is daunting–iPads, 1:1 initiatives, technology integration, podcasts, sharing and publishing student work, embeddable widgets, Common Core State Standards, digital citizenship, keyboarding. If you’re like me, you try to do what you can during the school year, but it’s summer, with its endless days and no schedule that gives you the freedom to let your brain lose.

Here’s my bucket list for this summer:

1. Teach online--that’s where education is going. I take a lot of webinars and online seminars. I love them. Why not offer that to my students as well? what a great way to help those who are sick or didn’t get what I was saying the first time and want to review.
   
2. Work on my blog–That’s this one, Ask a Tech Teacher, and one for my writing hobby called WordDreams. Blogs get stale if you don’t pay attention to them. I need to review the sidebars, the footers, links, menu items, make sure they’re still relevant.
   
3. Update the co-teaching wikis for my tech classes–the framework’s in place. I need to review and upgrade
   
4. Increase my PLN–I’m looking. Anyone have ideas? ISTE will be a resource. I am still trying to arrange to attend that in San Antonio.
   
5. Read tech books–but I need a list. What are your favorites? I have a few listed here, but it’s a small start to the wealth of information I know is out there.
6. Learn one new web-based tool every day–take weekends off. On my list are Evernote, Google Hangouts, WizIQ, Alice. What’s on your list?
   
7. Notice one tech use around me every day. Like QR codes. Do you believe how they’re everywhere? How about Siri? How can I use that in the classroom to connect tech class to everyday life?
8. Learn more about the iPad. These are taking over education.
   
9. Try tech tools I don’t understand. I’m learning Minecraft this summer. I am amazed at the passion even kindergartners have for this game/simulation. I need to understand it so I can use it to teach things like problem solving, collaboration, logical thinking. How about you? Pick one you think you won’t like. What about Twitter? or Facebook? Try them out. See how they work. Then, you’ll have good reasons why you don’t like them or you’ll change your mind)
10. Join an ed tech effort that’s bigger than me. I know I’ll come out of it motivated, inspired, ready to return to teaching in the Fall.

What are you doing this summer?

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Q:  There’s a program I use all the time, but it’s not on my desktop. I have to click through All-Programs-(etc–wherever it is you must go to find it). Is there a way to add it to my start menu so I can find it more easily?

A: Absolutely.

• Click through All-programs to wherever it is, but don’t open the program.
• Instead, right click on the icon that would normally open the program and select ‘pin to start menu’ from the drop down menu.

This will attach this program to your Start button in the future. Much easier! From this same menu, you could attach to program to your Taskbar if you prefer.

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Enough of that. Time to think about next year. I’ve got lots of ideas, but I’d like your input:

… Oh, I see. You’re busy trying to entertain your out-of-school children. I understand–I have a great list of all-encompassing websites at Great Websites for your children to visit. Students can freely visit any within their age group without you worrying about content (although, there’s still that stuff outside of the digital neighborhood called ‘ads’).

Are they busy now? Do you have a moment? Vote! I’m waiting…

Sigh…

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books on how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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