For the past few years, we (my school site) have been using Mavis Beacon to teach typing to our 6th grade students. This has presented immense technical problems, many having to do with problems in our local network, which has meant major delays in when the program can start with our students. Plus, our use of the computers has been delayed far too late in the school year for my comfort.

As I’m thinking about next year, I think I’m going to suggest that we abandon Mavis (since the version we’ve purchased isn’t compatible with the newer operating systems anyway), and start out with Dance Mat Typing, (which has levels, guides you through the different sets of letters) and then follow up with TypeRacer. Still chewing on this one, though…

First, we came up with a general scope and sequence of what things we wanted to teach our students throughout the year regarding technology. We identified skills and topics in the areas of:

1. Basic Intro to our hardware, software, rules and expectations

a. Procedures & Routines regarding the iBooks (every 4 teachers has a cart of 30 to share between them)
b. The Anatomy of the iBook

2. Mavis Beacon (the keyboarding program we use)
3. Safari (using a web browser)
4. Renaissance Place (including Accelerated Reader)
5. Basic research (web and otherwise)
6. World Book Encyclopedia
7. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint

Then, we split into a couple of smaller groups to concentrate on our areas of interest and expertise. We created various supports for teachers to teach the above skills and topics. Depending on the topic and need, these supports took the form of:
1. Lesson plans
2. “Kits” of documents for students to manipulate as lessons are followed
3. Templates for students to start from when doing activities
4. PowerPoint presentations to guide teachers through teaching some of these skills
5. Videos (made with SnapzPro) of us modeling some of these skills
6. A video podcast containing these videos in an RSS feed

As several of us said throughout the course of the week, this was a wonderful opportunity to do some things that we just never found the time to do during the regular school year. It never made it to the top of the priority list. It was great to have some time to really do it right, so we know that:

• when we want to teach these things, we’ll really be ready,
• our students will be much more technologically literate, and
• we’ll be ready to take our students to the next level, using our technology tools to foster further engagement and retention with our curriculum, and pushing students above and beyond what we or they can imagine right now!

It was a very stimulating time, and we made a lot of significant progress, which shows a lot of promise.

And finally, it was just an awful lot of fun! Much of our time was spent with us in the same room, each on our computers, sometimes talking/collaborating/discussing, but other times working quietly. At these times, we all seemed to get the same song in our head:
We happened to watch this YouTube video toward the beginning of the week, and we were never able to completely get this song out of our heads, and weren’t able to quit enjoying making each other laugh. There’s definitely something to be said for enjoying where you work, and who you work with.