Participation Packets Ready for Year 2

by Colleen Worrell, Secondary Technology Integration Coordinator

 

An email with details on the second year of HHS' 1-1 Laptop Program has been sent out to current 8th grade families via the district's listserve. The participation packets and financial aid forms were included as PDF attachments in that email, but these resources are also available on the 1-1 Website for your convenience: The 1-1 Initiative at Hopkinton High School.

Please contact HHS if you have any questions (508 497 9820).

We look forward to Year 2 of the program!

Say Goodbye to Hunt-and-Peck?

by Colleen Worrell, Secondary Technology Integration Coordinator

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

Many of us (over a “certain age”) have vivid memories of typing class: QUERTY, home keys, “asdf jkl;” and wrestling with the erase tape to correct mistakes. While I doubt many of us felt intellectually stimulated by our experiences in the keyboarding classroom, the advantages of this skill is hard to deny. Being able to type systematically, quickly, and (fairly) accurately helps us to be more efficient and to communicate effectively. In fact, there is evidence that suggest that how we type actually enables us to spend more time on tasks that involve higher order thinking. As Anne Trubek, Associate Professor of Composition at Oberlin College writes:

Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking.  (Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and reading—you’re not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the quotation mark key. We can write at the speed of thought (“Out of Touch with Typing,” MIT Technology Review).

Yet over the past decade, with increasing demands on schools and changing educational standards, typing class has become a relic of the past. This leaves both schools and parents with a conundrum: how can we create the time and opportunities for students to learn this skill?

In Hopkins School, 4th and 5th graders are receiving some typing instruction as part of their technology and library skills curriculum. Hopkins staff chose a free, online website called Typingweb.com to get their students typing. Both parents and students really like this site, so I wanted to share this resource with 1:1 program parents and students since this user-friendly site is a great way to build typing skills.

Of course, with the dramatic increase of cell phone use and texting in both tweens and teens (see, e.g., the Pew Research site on this), perhaps the biggest challenge we face is how to motivate today’s students to move beyond using their thumbs and learning the “proper” way to type? I’ll leave that sticky topic for another blog post....

Image from typinglessons.org