Teaching Kids Touch Typing is Outdated
There are many schools that don't teach typing anymore because they believe that students are already proficient at using a keyboard. That's a missed opportunity.
Many schools have stopped teaching typing due to the trend of children learning how to type on their phones and computers before taking keyboarding lessons. My son's school's teachers told us at curriculum night that children already know how to type, so computer time would be used on something else. But I think is teaching kids the right typing techniques is important to develop their skills.
After that teacher told me that they pause teaching kids touch typing, I started teaching my son at home. I use online typing test programs that help kids a lot in touch typing. It is the only way I found best to engage kids. Here, parents can carry their children's typing tests too.
Do kids still take typing classes?
Many people, even those who learned typing in school, stare at the keyboard while they type. Today, some kids are still learning typing (probably the class is called "keyboarding").
How do kids type?
Most develop idiosyncratic, personalized methods of hunting. Many people do not touch type or type without looking at the keyboard by placing their fingers on the home keys (asdf jkl). It is why touch typing is important. Certainly, people of my generation grew up with computers and were familiar with them before starting junior high school, as one of my undergraduates at Oberlin College put it. However, I believe most of us never learned how to type. Young people type pretty fast, but some only use two fingers and no home keys...if there's a "right way" to type, there aren't many of us who know it."
Since the late 19th century, there has been a "right way" to type. There was a "duel" in 1889 between two teachers who claimed to have come up with the best method. Using something called "home keys," the winner typed an astounding 126 words per minute. A few months later, Frank McGurrin toured the United States showing off his invention before large crowds. In the coming decades, there will be international typing races—like a version of So You Think You Can Type? The craze was the trend. Eventually, touch typing was taught in high school.
Classes like those are no longer available. Typing has fallen out of the curriculum in our era of keyboard ubiquity.) Nor has anyone invented an alternative to the home key method (a further puzzle is why we still cling to the QWERTY keyboard despite all of its shortcomings).
Educators are letting some young students' ad hoc keyboard habits dominate school while showing them how to hold a pencil and write a capital G; these skills are unlikely to be for use in their teenage years once they start typing their assignments.
The importance of handwriting for adult life will be largely ignored (not to mention how small the role is in adulthood). A public school explained to me, when I taught technology to K-3 students in an area near Philadelphia, "I only had students in a class for one 45-minute period per week, and that was all they had on computers during the week.". Other projects mean that there is no time for real keyboarding instruction and practice."
Is it important how we type? The answer is yes. By utilizing touch typing, we are able to write without thinking about how we are writing, allowing us to focus on what we are writing and our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious effort or awareness. Automatism frees up our working memory to focus on higher-order thinking.
(You're not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, are you?) When we type without looking at the keys, we're multitasking, liberating our brain from the burden of trying to locate the quotation mark key. We can write as fast as we think.
Our hunting and pecking hunts have become automatic for many of us, especially digital natives, so we can focus on our screens and not our fingers (A skilled typist needs about 400 hours of practice, and an expert needs 600 hours. However, the home keys method is the fastest one so far as research shows. And I don't think it is a stretch to say that knowing how to type quickly without looking at the keyboard is a basic 21st-century skill.
But the letters keep shifting beneath our fingers. Keyboards morph, and smartphones and tablet computers make the home keys method unusable. iPad users hunt and peck: the technologies so many Americans are clamoring for are far less effective for writing than previous models. Interestingly, we are adopting new devices at the expense of cognitive automaticity.
Twittering, emailing, and posting on Facebook take longer on the iPad, and require frequent glances at the touch keypad. Someone out there is tinkering with a new typing system for the iPad, as Frank McGurrin did for the typewriter (although we may need to practice it for 400 hours to master it).
The neologism "touch typing" entered the English language 15 years after touch typing was developed. Maybe we need another duel -- a reality TV show about iPad typing? -to stimulate new keyboarding innovations. However, even the youngest children should be taught why the "f" and "j" keys have those funny bumps on them.