'Keyboard skills' is just a fancy name for typing. Having tested the typing skills of many of our students, I am concerned that their typing technique leaves much to be desired.
All this is worrying because it means the students are getting into bad habits that will ultimately limit their typing speed and efficiency. Even though I feel that typing correctly (with all fingers and, ultimately, without looking at the keyboard) is an important skill, I do not intend to spend any time teaching this in class, since it is both time-consuming to learn and straightforward to learn at home, provided the students are motivated to acquire this skill. Also, we have a mixture of French and English keyboards at school and there is no point in learning to become proficient using a keyboard layout that is not the one the student is likely to be using for the rest of his or her life.
Let's do the math... Assuming:
then the number of hours you should expect to be typing on a computer during what's left of your life is 66 x 365 x 1 = more than 24 thousand hours!! If you can learn to quadruple your typing speed this year (as most of our students could do, since they are so slow) then that typing time would be reduced to 6 thousand hours so in other words if you spend say a hundred hours this year improving your typing technique and speed then you can save maybe 18 thousand hours later on! That's my idea of a good investment - 180 hours saved for each hour you spend learning and practicing good technique this year!
Maybe you're thinking you're too busy this year or not motivated enough - you'll do it later? NO - you will be much busier later and you will have bad habits by then that will be very hard to break!
Students: Get into good habits now and you will one day be able to type fast, like a professional typist.
Parents: Please persuade your children that this is a skill worth learning, even though it will be slow and frustrating initially. Encourage your children to practice regularly using typing tutor software, widely available commercially and probably also available as shareware (free to try, then you buy) or freeware.
At some point, you must decide whether you want to become proficient with an English (Qwerty) keyboard or a French (Azerty) keyboard - I don't think it is good to use both. If you have to type in French quite often then I recommend you use a French keyboard rather than an English one because it is much easier to type English on a French keyboard than French on an English keyboard, because of the accents.
Have you ever wondered why so many of the keys you use most often (A, E, R, T, S etc) are placed under fingers of your left hand that you don't really like using? You may find this hard to believe, but your keyboard was designed to be hard to use, to stop you typing fast!! This is because keyboards were designed when people used typewriters rather than computers, and fast typing could cause the machine to jam. Computers are electronic rather than mechanical so there is no risk of them jamming, so why do we continue to use these hard-to-use keyboards? Why doesn't someone design a better layout? Well, someone has - his name is Dvorak but the easy-to-use Dvorak keyboard has never caught on even though it was invented years ago. You can guess why - the Qwerty keyboard is so widespread that people consider it the 'standard' that they are obliged to follow.
I recommend the site www.goodtyping.com since it is free and the lessons are well-presented. In order for this site to track your progress you must provide a name and password but in fact these can be fake since they are only used to identify you, not to send you email. Just make sure then that you supply a name and email address that you can remember easily.
Here are some more links to programs that should improve your typing speed and technique. All these programs are designed for use with a Qwerty (English) keyboard.
Mr. Ward will test your typing skills again at the beginning and end of the year in the lower grades. Good luck!