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TypingAce is a fully web-based typing tutor for schools that offer full typing course, fun typing games, and instructor tools available from both school and home Typing Ace offers a full typing course for students at all levels, from Beginners through Intermediate to Advanced, including Specialty Lessons that allow for custom content. It is supported on multiple operation systems - Windows/Mac/Linux and multiple browsers - Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome.
Typing Ace aids students with an on-screen keyboard indicating proper finger placement and clear keyboarding instructions in the beginning of each lesson. Typing information is available before and between exercise groups to reinforce proper typing techniques. Integrated typing test that measure keyboarding speed and accuracy are available for regular assessment and both students and teachers have access to detailed graphs and statistics to track progress.Interactive Typing Games offer a host of entertaining learning activities and printable certificates of completion are available to motivate students. TypingAce's management and reporting tools allow teachers to manage students, monitor progress, and customize course material. How should Keyboarding be taught?Research shows that children with keying skills are able to compose faster, are prouder of their work, produce documents with a neater appearance, have better motivation, and demonstrate improved language arts skills (Nieman, 1996). Benefits of acquiring keyboarding skills include the enhanced use of time and effective use of computers (Elementary /Middle School Keyboarding Strategies Guide, 1992). Everyone who will use computers needs to develop “touch” keyboarding skills. This emphasis is on the skill of entering alphanumeric data for the primary purposes of obtaining, processing, or communicating information (Schmidt, 1985).
PracticePerfecting keyboarding skills requires a great deal of practice. The typical elementary school spends 10 – 20 hours per year in teaching students to keyboard. This might be in a compressed format (i.e., 30 minutes a day for 4 weeks = 10 hours) or spaced (i.e., 30 minutes per week for 36 weeks = 18 hours) (Fleming, 2002). Either way, this is not enough time to reach a level of competence or automaticity with keyboarding. Crews, North and Erthal (2006) provide a table of “Speed Expectations” where they indicate that it is reasonable to expect students to type at 10 – 15 WPM after 15 – 18 hours of instruction. Secondary schools typically spend a whole period teaching typing. Intermingled with the correspondence activities that integrate with learning to type, a 15-week class might yield 45 hours of keyboarding instruction and practice. This would yield a typing speed of 45-60 WPM on the Speed Expectations table.
Did you know?*Dedicated software helps mastering touch typing skills on tablets and smartphone: iOS, Android
*MIT researchers analyze keyboarding to aid Parkinson's diagnosis. *TextBlade - miniature touch typing device for any platform (iPhones, iPads or Android) *Latest technology: Get Inspired:) How to Log in?You can access the Typing Ase online tool from the top of this page or the school website www.aas-sofia.org. You need to go to www.aas-sofia.org and select the red link 'Students' from the top right corner of the site. You then choose "Typing Ace" and type your username and password. Students usernames and passwords are available from the shared document "Students passwords" and all teachers are administrators of their classes. If you experience any difficulties, please contact Ralitsa Tareva, the ES Technology specialist @0877652283; 09238810 [email protected].
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All AAS Elementary School students from Grade3 to Grade5, have Typing Ace student accounts. With our young students from Kindergarten to Grade2 we use the alternative keyboarding tutors 2Type on Purplemash, Keyboarding Without Tears and Dance Mat Typing. The focus in the lower school is on hand and fingers position and posture while the upper elementary school emphasis is on speed and accuracy.
Why Keyboarding?Handwriting and keyboarding are essential life-long skills students need to master and produce effective written work and they both develop through proper instruction over time. Both skills need to be learned and applied together to create an engaged, balanced, and successful learning environment in the 21st century classroom. Keyboarding is also an essential skill for integrating technology, necessary for students to become efficient users of technology gather information, solve problems, and communicate knowledge. Similar to the importance of handwriting, which was provoked by the invention of the printing press in the 19 Century industrial age, keyboarding is now essential skill for developing the digital literacies of the 21 Century information age. It is crucial to encourage and develop good keyboarding habits from very early years both at home and in the classroom. Instruction must therefore include early practice and repetition that focuses on proper keyboarding technique, accuracy and speed.
Cognitive Phase (Key Introduction)
This initial stage involves the students deliberately thinking about the rules of technique (body, arm and hand position; key stroking; and ergonomics). The beginning typist is also consciously thinking about the position of each individual key. Entering lines of text involves seeing, processing, and tapping strings of characters separated periodically by spaces. Learners are also purposely working to accomplish key combinations like the proper use of shift keys. In this phase it is important to introduce the keys in a sequence that will foster student success. The learner’s progression while learning the keyboard should be a cumulative process. Pairings of characters should be introduced together with sufficient practice activities in a variety of contexts to afford the learner a certain amount of mastery before moving to the next set of keys. The following lesson should introduce a new set of characters and provide fresh practice activities that incorporate the first set of characters as well as the newly-learned keys. This collective process should be continued throughout the entire keyboard.
Associative Stimulus PhaseOn-going practice through exercises and activities that are of high interest, high motivation, and high activity can motivate learners to engage in the repetition necessary to facilitate developing “kinesthetic memory traces.” Through this process, students learn to connect the recognition of the character with the action of striking the corresponding key. Developing kinesthetic memory traces is part of the psychomotor learning process.
This stage of learning is the longest of the phases and involves developing a sense of continuity and rhythm in keyboarding. Continuity is cultivated through practicing and mastering common character combinations and words, and acquiring kinesthetic memory traces. Rhythm is developed through a steady repetition of keystrokes. At this stage accuracy is not as important as speed and rhythm. Support during this phase could begin with a consistent rhythm as with a metronome. However, as the learner masters keyboarding an individualized cadence will naturally develop based upon how the typist addresses groups of letters, rather than from an external musical beat. Autonomous Muscle Response PhaseThe goal of teaching keyboarding is to familiarize students with the keyboard to a point where they develop automaticity (Bloom, 1986). Automaticity is a level of proficiency where the learner is able to complete a task as a whole without devoting attention to each individual component task. Keyboarding automaticity requires facility in typing to the point where the operator is keying without thinking of the individual keys. In fact, if an accomplished keyboarder tries to think about what each finger is doing, “the entire typing process would collapse,” (Bloom, 1986, p. 73).
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