We were cleaning out our garage and storage room for a trip to the thrift store to drop of some of our old junk. We happen to come across John’s old low tech college typewriter in the suitcase. Our grandkids happen to be spending the night and they didn’t know what in the heck this old dinosaur, piece of machinery was!
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| This is how I learned to keyboard…..typing on an old Royal typewriter…age 16 |
It is so amazing that my little 2 year old granddaughter in the picture below can play on an Ipad better than either of her grandparents combined. But I can type 90 words a minute on this old machine! (Oh yeah, I’ve got skills!)
I learned to type in high school many years ago on one even less streamlined than this one. It was the noisiest class you can imagine! They would play a cassette tape really loud over the speaker system and it would tell us what keys to type in succession to a rythmic beat. There were probably 50 kids typing in that class. Such a ruckus we all made!
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| Here’s my granddaugter Megan, age 3….she is a wizard playing games and learning programs on the Ipad. |
Now kids are learning keyboarding as young as 5 in schools using portable mac laptops, alpha smarts and the other minis. It is amazing the technology out there and how fast it can change. When I watch kids changing the font, the color of text and highlighting and deleting their text so quickly, skills that took a long time to learn in computer classes years ago, I’m always surprised by the things kids “pick up” on their own without any training. None of them are afraid to go poking around to see what this thing can do!
Now here we are, many years later, teaching computer keyboarding to young kids so they can master computer skills at an ever earlier age. It is a new generation of little people who are not afraid to putter around with high tech machines.
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| Keyboarding kids…. |
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| They are learning the home row…. |
I was always afraid I would delete something when I first started word processing at age 21. I was a legal secretary with an Associates Degree in Secretarial Training from Ricks College. (Don’t laugh…I can almost hear you snickering now!) and my patent-lawyer boss went from a Correcting Selectric model of typewriter to a Panasonic word processing typewriter. It made the job of a legal secretary soooooo much easier! You could actually type up the patent applications without white out or carbon paper. It was so easy to remedy mistakes. That was back in the late 70s. Yeah, I’m feeling old today!
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| Keyboard Chatter is the curriculum they are using…. |
I used to have to type up patent applications from my boss’s scribbling on yellow legal pads. Then he’d make changes with a black felt tip to my 1st draft, and we’d go from there to many more typed drafts. After new technology invaded our law office, thanks to Panasonic, I could go in and change just a few sentences here and there and reprint new copies super easily. It was the precurser machine to a computer. It had a tiny screen that only showed you 2 sentences of type, but you could back up whatever you had typed with ease too. What a time saver it became.
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| I know they are learning new technology at exponential rates… |
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| Learning Keyboarding at age 7….who would have thought? |
When I left that job to go have my first baby, they replaced me with another Panasonic. Such is the speed of technology. I wonder how long before teachers will be replaced with computers? I don’t even think a decade will pass before teaching looks vastly different than it is today. We shall see. In the meantime, look at what these kids can do with our mobile computer labs here at Sunrise!
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| We’ll be typing up our stories very soon! |
