Keyboarding Instruction. Several folks asked about the keyboarding program used in the elementary schools. Here are ideas from Sheryl, Karen, and Cindy.  

From Sheryl Little: We all have TTL 3.  It runs from the server and should be an application on all networked computers. In my building, I am in charge of TTL3.  I create classes and set levels.  My school has multi-aged classrooms so I start the 3^rd/4^th graders and lesson 1 (even if they did it the year before) and they continue on through lesson 15.  The system keeps track of their progress and doesn’t let them proceed until they reach a certain accuracy rate.  At my school, I also have the students show me their scores after lessons 5, 10 and 15.  They have to have 80% accuracy or I set them back to the previous lesson to get more practice.  I have them in the lab 2 days a week for 25 minutes each time.  When they finish lesson 15, I print a certificate and present it with much ado!

            Many schools also have their older students go through TTL3 also.  In my school, the 5^th/6^th teachers feel like they have too much curriculum to cover to allot that much time.  So I usually start everyone at lesson 1 and the teacher stops me after a couple of weeks so they can do their regular writing workshops.

            I’ve attached a handout that someone else made that the librarians came up with last year.   [Download the TTL Setup handout here.]   PS – Headphones are wonderful!

From Karen Franker: Great answer, Sheryl!   I manage TTL much the same as you, except that my four-hour media secretary supervises most of the twice-weekly practice sessions for each of the seven 3rd/4th grade homerooms. She also enters all of the student names and deletes names of students who have moved. I set the accuracy levels for each grade, and sometimes for individual students, esp. those who have IEP's and might get easily frustrated if the speed goal is set so high that they can't progress very easily.

            Like you, we rarely have time in the classroom or computer lab schedule for 5th/6th graders to do much more than a cursory review of Type to Learn. If any 5th/6th grade student has really poor hand position or extremely slow speed (less than 10 WPM), we try to put them into a bit of remedial typing practice for a few weeks to bring them "up to speed".

            The TTL progress reports feature comes in really handy when you're writing conference and end-of-year reports!

From Cindy Kunde: Hi, all. Our situation at Wickham is very similar to how Karen does it at Van Allen. One difference is that we schedule some TTL review time for 5^th & 6^th graders right at the beginning of the year—2 times a week for about a month. Our 4-hour media secretary supervises those classes, but we ask the classroom teacher to be there to assist. After the month, some of the teachers continue to bring their students to the lab on their own to work on keyboarding using TTL.