#touch typing practice

KAZ’s multi-sensory ‘accelerated learning’ teaching method, enables students to learn using more than one sense (sight, sound and touch).

With computers and smart mobile devices becoming more and more important in all aspects of our lives, the necessity of good typing skills are now more important than ever. This is particularly true for children of school going age. From doing research to writing out assignments, computers are used everywhere. Improper typing can thus put children at a disadvantage.

What do we mean by improper typing? 

A lot of typists typically look at the keyboard to find out the characters they want to press, and type them with one or two fingers only. This technique, called ‘hunt-and-peck’ typing is slow, tedious, and can lead to long term physical ailments. The better and more natural typing alternative is touch typing, a technique where all the fingers are used to identify the keys to be pressed on the keyboard.

Why is touch typing better for kids?

The advantages of touch typing for kids are aplenty, especially if you consider the increasing relevance of computers in their lives. Some of these advantages are:

Accuracy and speed: 

Touch typing helps train the muscle memory so that keys can be identified without looking at the keyboard. This speeds up typing greatly, and accomplished touch typists have been known to regularly type over 70-80 words per minute. Touch typing tutorials also focus on typing accuracy, leading to lesser mistakes and fewer corrections necessary. Together, this ensures children work more efficiently and faster. Whether writing out lengthy assignments or projects, or doing research, or typing out answers in computer-based exams, everything can be completed faster and better. Students today will be job seekers in future, and touch typing will aid them greatly in tests that need typing skills.

Quality: 

The muscle memory we talk about doesn’t only speed up typing, it also automates typing. Keys are pressed without having to consciously think about which ones to press. This automation not only allows keys to be pressed faster, but also frees up cognition, letting you think about what you actually want to write. Thus, ideas are captured faster and translated into text as soon as they appear, thereby improving the work quality greatly.

Improved learning: 

Learning to touch type in combination with reading greatly improves learning, especially for very young kids and those with learning difficulties. This is because together they make up a multi-sensory learning method as kids listen to a spoken word, read it on screen, and type it out. Since more senses are involved in the process, the result is faster learning and better retention.

Learning difficulties: 

For kids with learning difficulties, touch typing tutorials are nothing short of a boon. Medical conditions like dyslexia, and dysgraphia make it almost impossible for sufferers to learn writing by hand. Touch typing comes to the rescue with far simpler motions required to write than writing on paper. Also for those suffering musculoskeletal disabilities, visual impairment, conditions in the Autism spectrum, etc. touch typing facilitates learning and therefore, literacy.