Mouse resource list constantly updated here
Many of my most popular articles are about mouse skills. Every year, tens of thousands of teachers visit Ask a Tech Teacher to find resources for teaching students how to use a mouse. No surprise because using a mouse correctly is one of the most important pre-keyboarding skills. Holding it is not intuitive and if learned wrong, becomes a habit that’s difficult to break.
The earlier posts are still active, but I’ve updated this resource with more websites and posters to assist in starting off your newest computer aficionados.
Mouse Skills
- Bees and Honey
- Drawing Melody–draw in many colors with the mouse and create music
- Hover skills–drag mouse over the happy face and see it move
- Left-click practice while playing the piano
- MiniMouse
- Mouse and tech basics–video
- Mouse practice—drag, click
- Mouse skills
- Mouse Song
-
OwlieBoo–mouse practice
- Wack-a-gopher (no gophers hurt in this)
Puzzles
Kids love puzzles and they are a great way to teach drag-and-drop skills with the mouse buttons. Here are some of my favorites:
- Digipuzzles–great puzzles for geography, nature, and holidays
- Jigsaw Planet–create your own picture jigsaw
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Jigzone–puzzles
- Jigsaw Puzzles–JS
Adults
Posters
Bookmark this page on Mouse Skills to stay up-to-date as I find more resources.
Track Pad Skills
I received this comment from a reader:
“We haven’t had “mice” at our school in quite a few years. I teach trackpad skills via Chromebooks which requires a different mind/skill set. Younger children need to press with the index finger on one hand and lightly drag with the index finger of another hand for optimum control. Right-click is the simultaneous two finger press. Paint programs are a nice way to develop these skills.
All of the aforementioned sites are certainly adaptable to trackpads. In keeping with the KISS principle, the attention to the fine motor-skill capability per age/grade is important. I’ve found it isn’t until the second half of the school year that first graders are able to attempt mastery of holding with one finger while lightly moving with the other for a drag and drop or selection [NOT highlighting]. The temptation to push with one finger while dragging doesn’t give young students control over the cursor, and thus, the beauty of practicing this via simple paint program lessons. The correlation is also made to first holding the shift key with one finger while capitalizing with another finger.
That is about as posty as I get if you’d like to use it.
I have been on the lookout for good trackpad skill sites. Let me know if you have any. Here are a few:
More on mouse skills:
Dear Otto: Should Lefties Use Right Hands for Mousing Around
Tech Tip #61: How to Get Youngers to Use the Right Mouse Button
Dear Otto: Should I fix ‘Thumb clicking’?
Internet4Classrooms Mouse skills
Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice reviewer, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, a contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.
These are very good sites to teach fine motor skills and mouse technique. I would have children put this into practice with some simple web games such as the ones at http://avenscorner.com.
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Thanks for sharing this site with us. Looks very interesting.
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Reblogged this on The Digital Literacy Vine and commented:
Hello all:
Just clicking around to see what other bloggers were sharing regarding digital literacy and I came across this post. Thanks to Jacqui Murray for this post1 🙂
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Thanks for the reblog, Debra!
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hi,
I lead a class of seniors in learning to use computer (Windows)
We were using a game called Stacker and Fishing on a site called
Mrs campbell’s Mouserobics. Recently most of these games
now are redirected to a junior disney website which does not include these games.
I would eal like to get this particular games for our students as they balnce the
need for mouse skills without being to childish for seniors.
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Here’s a site I came across that has mouse exercises for seniors–http://www.seniornet.org/howto/mouseexercises/mousepractice.html. I’ll see if I can find some others.
I have moved to a self-hosted WordPress site–http://askatechteacher.com. You’ll find current material over there.
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