When I surveyed the 2nd thru 5th Graders and asked them what they would like to learn in the Tech Lab this year, I imagined things like making movies, geocaching, coding, and so many exciting things. Surprisingly, the one thing they wanted to learn was....keyboarding! They see me typing fast, not looking at my fingers and they want to be able to do it too! It's kind of magic to them and they want to know how I do the trick. I come from the old school (literally) where we used a clunky typewriter to learn how to type. There were no back spaces that would wipe away all errors; no copy/paste options and so on. Thinking back, I remember a ruler tap on my hand from the teacher to get my attention too. But that's another day's blog.....Anyway, so...I went out on a search for the just-right typing tool. There a quite a few programs out there. Some interesting, some pretty pricey, some that have pop-ups with awful images...the list goes on as to what I was able to find. Until....I found "Typing Club" (http://www.typingclub.com/typing-qwerty-en.html).
"Typing Club", is a free web-based program. It's best if you download the app in your Chrome/Google Apps account, but works brilliantly on any browser. Essentially, the program takes the new typist step by step through lessons. There are 100 of these lessons, which are locked until you master the lesson before. (Thank You!) They explain fingering and the lesson is centered around getting used to not looking at your fingers and locating the key based on the comfort of finding the bumps on keys 'F' and 'J'.
I've not gone through each of the 100 lessons yet, but I'm happy to say there are no pop-ups with cringe worthy images or mature advertisements to contend with. (Another Thank You!) There are School accounts; both Free and Paid. (https://s.typingclub.com/schools/pricing.html) The Free account offers unlimited Student accounts, 2 Instructor accounts, 3 Classes and 30-days of data retention, plus lessons are customizable. The Paid account offers quite a bit more to include more security and an iPad version of the program.
This is a 'hit' in my opinion!
Elana Moore
