![]() Type to learn typing tv#Perhaps we need another duel-a reality TV iPad typing show? -to spur new keyboarding innovations. There was a 15-year lag between the development of touch typing and when the neologism “touch typing” entered the English language. Hopefully someone out there is tinkering with a new typing system for the iPad, as Frank McGurrin did for the typewriter (although then we may have to practice it for 400 hours to master it). On the iPad, tweeting, e-mailing and Facebooking takes more time, requires lots of looking down at the touch keypad. Strangely, we are adopting new devices at the cost of cognitive automaticity. Most iPad users hunt and peck: the technologies so many Americans are clamoring to adopt are far less effective for writing than previous devices. Keyboards morph, and smart phones and tablet computers render the home keys method almost impossible. And it is not going out on any limb to suggest being able to type fast without looking at the keyboard is a 21 st century basic skill.īut the letters keep shifting below our fingers. However, the home keys method is, as far as extant research goes, the fastest technique. Many of us, and particularly digital natives, have practiced elaborate hunt and peck methods enough for them to be automatic and allow us to look at the screen, not our fingers (it requires about 400 hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist, another 600 to be expert. Type to learn typing free#(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. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness. 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. With various other projects, there is no time for real keyboarding instruction and practice.”ĭoes it matter how we type? Yes. As a K-3 technology teacher in a Philadelphia area public school explained to me, “I only see students at most for one 45-minute period per week, and it may be the only time the students have on a computer that week. (Not to mention how little handwriting will figure into their adult lives). Type to learn typing how to#Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand, although these same teachers spend hours laboriously showing their pupils how to hold a pencil and the correct way to write a cursive capital G-skills that the kids will likely rarely use once they get to high school, when typed assignments are the norm. Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum.) Nor has anyone invented a rival to the home keys method (that we still cling to the QWERTY keyboard, despite the advantages of other layouts, is yet another puzzle). Touch typing was eventually taught in high school. Over the next few decades, international typing races-a sort of So You Think You Can Type? trend-were the craze. Afterwards, the inventor, Frank McGurrin, toured the country, performing his feat in front of large crowds. The winner, who used something called “home keys,” typed a then-astonishing 126 words per minute. In 1889, there was a “duel” between two teachers who claimed to have devised the best methods. ![]() ![]() ![]() There has been, since the late 19 th century, a “right way” to type. ![]()
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