ICS2O_0106_keyboarding

=Keyboarding!=

The importance of keyboarding...

Keyboarding skills are very important for many reasons: quick communication, educational purposes (i.e. those long English essays or reports in Business class) are among them. There are many documents that require keyboarding skills, such as contract preparation, business letters, and of course emailing.

Our course doesn't spend a lot of time on keyboarding but the goal remains: touch typing at a reasonable speed with good accuracy. Touch typing means typing without looking at the keys.

Click on Rules and Tools to review keyboarding rules. There are several ways to accomplish this goal. First and foremost you must have proper technique. This includes:

- Sit up straight!

- Your belly button should be opposite the H key.

- Your arms fall comfortably from your shoulders.

- Bend your elbows and run your arms parallel to the keyboard.

- Do not rest your wrists on the keyboard or desk.

- Your index fingers should rest lightly on the F and J keys.

- Place the rest of your fingers on the "HOMEROW".

- Your fingers should be curved from the knuckles down.

- Use your right baby finger to strike the ENTER key when you want to go to the next line, without moving your right index finger from the J key. This graphic will show you colour coded instructions for your fingers: When you need to key an upper case letter, use the pinky finger of the opposite hand. Try leaving the other home row fingers in place. This graphic demonstrates: Now the hard part, teaching your fingers which keys to gently strike. Remember to always return to the homerow. Many software programs have been written to make learning how to keyboard easier.

QWERTY versus DVORAK

The first keyboard and typewriter were both invented in the 1800's. Soon after typists became too fast for the typewriter as the keys would jam. To correct this the letters were arranged in the familiar pattern we now see on the keyboard. This is known as the Qwerty keyboard, after the letters in the top row of the keyboard. This arrangement is not, however, the most efficient. An alternative keyboard layout is known by the name of its originator, Dvorak. The Dvorak layout places more of the commonly used letters on the middle homerow, which would seem to be a more useful arrangment. Claims have been made suggesting the Dvorak layout is at least a little more efficient, allows for greater speed and is ergonomically efficient. Still, with the many millions of keyboards fixed on Qwerty, a change to Dvorak is probably not going to happen any time soon. A comparison of the layouts is below. Activity - Keyboarding __Testing your Skills __ Using the following website Typing Test, see how good your keyboarding skills are at this time. Good luck! And remember to keep your eyes on the monitor and not on your fingers!!!

Practising your Skills Deepen your keyboarding skills at: http://www.keybr.com/#!game