No matter how you look at it, typing is becoming an essential skill for every student to learn around the world. Because of this, it is the job of teachers to guide and assist students navigate the online world. This is a lot of responsibility to take on alone, so teachers are choosing software like Typesy to help them teach typing more effectively.
To get your students motivated to type, start a discussion about why we need to type in the first place. You can have them write down or share ideas with the class. Either way, getting students to have a personal reason to invest in typing is just what they need to get motivated. Students that have their own motivation to learn are much easier to guide and teach than those who are forced to learn. Continue encouraging students with helpful typing tips and be sure that they are learning the essential skills to proper typing for the future.
Typing is a tough process to teach and learn, so be prepared for some setbacks and learning experiences. Both you and the students are new to this, so make sure everyone feels comfortable with setbacks and failures at the keyboard.
It’s true - there are many tangible benefits to having this skill, and it’s important to relay those benefits onto your students. I believe teachers should be explaining real-world applications as often as possible!
Of course, there are the immediate focuses: as presented in key national standards, keyboarding is deemed an essential skill. Many states have converted from paper- to computer-based tests, meaning students must have a solid foundation of keyboard learning in order for test scores not to skew.
But I like to discuss less concrete benefits with my class, too. I’ll have students consider the time saved across an entire lifetime. If you were to hypothesize the time spent typing over a lifetime and compare time spent between a hunt-and-peck typist and a touch-typist, you’re sure to be shocked. Proficient, relatively speedy typing may not seem to be a skill that makes much of a difference every second of every day, but those seconds, minutes, and hours add up over a lifetime. So not only do you benefit from learning to type, you’ll continue to benefit from saved time in perpetuity.
As the world continues to rely more heavily on technology, the ability to type has become a necessary skill for any and all entering the 21st-century workforce, so whatever we can do as teachers to prepare our students for this reality, the better!
