Gamification of Keyboarding
Keyboarding is one of the big units I have to teach to elementary students. I teach pre-keyboarding skills in K and 1 and begin formal keyboarding instruction with the homerow in 2nd and full keyboarding instruction in 3rd - 5th. In analyzing student data last year, I noticed that many students with IEPs and Lit Plans are not making adequate progress in keyboarding and for many of these students keyboarding is listed as an accommodation on their IEP. Keyboarding cannot be an accommodation if students have not achieved some level of proficiency in keyboarding.
As school ended I realized that I needed to do some action research to determine what would best meet the needs of my students. I started the summer reading as much as I could about teaching keyboarding (there is a very limited amount of scholarly work in this area). I attended InnEdCo in June, where I hoped to learn more about keyboarding. There were no workshops directly on keyboarding, however, I made some great connections. Handwriting Without Tears had a booth at the conference and I learned about Keyboarding Without Tears. I was lucky to be able to then attend a follow up workshop with HWT called From Pencils to Keyboards: Written Production in the Digital Classroom.
Having a better understanding of the phases of keyboarding development, I set about revamping my curriculum. As I worked through the objectives I want students to learn, I recalled a workshop on gamification I attended at InnEdCo, which got me thinking in a new direction. This year keyboarding will be gamified. Use Gamification and badges for students to see their progress and maintain motivation.
Students will enter QWERTY Land and move through different lands based on their phase in the keyboarding learning process.
Students may stay in any land for as long as they need to complete that phase of learning.
Each land will include quests from:
Keyboarding without Tears
Typing Club
Dance Mat Typing
Keyboarding Games (http://www.symbaloo.com/home/mix/13eOcMQP6h )
offline keyboarding games (kinesthetic
authentic keyboarding or word processing tasks (sight words, spelling words, other writing assignments)
Students will earn points for completing quests that work toward mastery of the objectives in their specific phase of learning. As students earn points for participation they will gain higher levels of adventurer status. This will give students who take longer to learn the positive reinforcement of making progress.
As students master different skills they will earn badges to show mastery of the skill. This will give the student who learns keyboarding more quickly badges for completing skills.
I have created the game in Google Classroom. Each land is a separate Google Classroom and students will move through the different lands as they master the objectives of the land. Students can choose which quests to complete within the land and gain their points by turning in screenshots of their completed activities. Students can do the level up challenge (assessment) whenever they feel they have mastered the objectives of the level. (I will be closely monitoring progress and will encourage leveling up whenever I see a student has mastered the level, if they don't self select the level up challenge). I am hopeful that this will honor and recognize various types of learning.
