Technology and Typing
While I have intentionally rejected an educational or parenting approach that saturates children in copious amounts of screen time, I’ve always intended to ensure our kids are not technologically illiterate. After all, technology is a useful and good tool, when used wisely.
Our Technology use in Homeschooling
For most of our homeschooling journey so far, the use of technology has been pretty limited. For example, their Math-U-See lessons are watched on DVD, as are some of their IEW writing lessons. When we studied Habitats they were permitted to watch a David Attenborough documentary once a week, and during our Politics term, a bit of time was spent viewing Parliament TV and YouTube videos of “MPs behaving badly”. This year Friday afternoons have been dedicated to Rotation Stations which means each child gets 20-30 minutes of maths games on SumDog. But most of our homeschooling approach involves traditional pencils and paper.
Many elements of technology seem pretty intuitive and hardly worth considering as part of their education. For example, if even a toddler can figure out how to use an iPad, why should I waste my kids’ precious childhood on it? Merely growing up in this era seems to qualify one as an expert in plenty of technological devices. However, there are certain technology-related skills that I definitely want them to learn, such as typing, coding, using Excel and perhaps even website design.
Typing
Now that my oldest two are 9 and 11 years old, I’ve started them on typing lessons. In the past I purposely haven’t let them “type” their stories etc up as a general rule, because I didn’t want them learning bad habits that they would then have to unlearn later on. The typing program we’ve started with is typing.com – and it’s totally free! It’s so amazing what resources there are now – this was just one we picked out of several options. I remember learning to type in my Information Technology class at high school – it was nowhere near as colourful and fun but it’s been such a useful skill to have.
Thus far they are both loving the typing lessons, and – thankfully – conscientiously using the correct fingering. They usually do one lesson a day during the week. Hopefully I will be able to report in a year’s time that I have two competent young typists!
