Our Keyboarding Smore and Symbaloo To Share!

Today, we kicked off a new keyboarding program with our elementary students at Van Meter. 

We created a Smore online newsletter for our families and teachers.  We shared it this morning before the students came to the library to....

...learn about the resources we pulled together for the Keyboarding Symbaloo that you will find here.

Within the Symbaloo, there are online tools, apps and tasks for learning how to keyboard, games to strengthen keyboarding skills and timed typing sites to track growth in speed and accuracy.  We will include several holiday and seasonal resources and activities that are fantastic to use too.

With consistent practice, they will gain accuracy and speed, and also be able to convey their thoughts through keyboarding successfully.  While, of course, having fun!

Our kindergarten and first graders explored the keyboard and worked on mouse skills through different websites.

We give them choice to what they want to visit.  It was interesting watching them explore and learn more about the keyboard. 

With our second through fifth graders, we are going to be using several websites and apps for them to practice keyboarding.  There are lots of digital keyboarding games, sites and even a few timed typing tests they can visit on the Symbaloo.  Again, choice is important. 

For the organized, self-guided instruction, we will be using Typing.com.  We signed up every class with their own Typing.com class.  

We included the link to the classes on each grade level Symbaloo as shown above. This made it very easy for them to go to their class as they signed up using school gmail accounts.  It will be handy for them to use these tiles throughout the year too. 

 It was fun watching them sign up in Typing.com, personalizing their account,

thinking about their hand placement and posture,

while learning how it is set up and how they will work....

 ...through it it at school and....

 ...at home.

I can't wait to see the difference this site and all of the other sites, apps and activities will have on our learners as they use these resources to learn and practice keyboarding at school and home.

We will be using Typing.com and these other resources with our middle school students as well.

You can get to the Let's Learn & Practice Keyboarding Smore here. 

Please feel free to make a copy and use it for your own keyboarding program too.