This We Believe About Improving Keyboarding Technique [PDF]

Recommendations on how you can help your students improve their keyboarding technique and how GDP Skillbuilding and MAP can help.

Orientation to Technique Checks

Topics discussed include fundamental principles for developing proper keyboarding technique, factors used to assess technique, and remediation strategies for identified weaknesses. GDP provides unlimited skillbuilding drills for remediation, such as MAP+, which includes powerful, individualized diagnostics and other drills available via the Skillbuilding button.
 

Timed Writings—Open, Custom, & Supplementary

Open, Custom, & Supplementary Timed Writings [PDF] includes directions on creating and using Open, Custom, and Supplementary Timed Writing features.

• Open Timed Writings allows instructors to have students type from any open copy and have copy scored automatically for speed (students and instructors would have to manually proofread such copy).

• Custom Timed Writings allows instructors to input their own timed writing copy and have it automatically scored for speed and accuracy.

• Supplementary Timed Writing allow instructors to have access to extra timed writings already available in the textbook, perhaps for testing purposes.

Custom Timed Writing Copy

Download and open any of the timed writings files that follow to access copy related to business, legal, and medical topics that you can copy and paste into GDP to create your own Custom Timed Writings. See Open, Custom, & Supplementary Timed Writings [PDF], "To create a CTW," for details.

•  Business Timed Writings

•  Legal Timed Writings

•  Medical Timed Writings

All timed writings and skillbuilding available via GDP have been included on this planning grid. Suggestions for skillbuilding remediation have also been included. This grid should be useful in planning courses in which skillbuilding is the main focus. A “Results” column has been included in case you wish to record student progress.

• Lessons 1-20 include about 50 minutes of skillbuilding.
• Lessons 21-120 include 15-20 minutes of systematic skillbuilding—that is, each type of exercise builds skill in a different way and each type appears systematically throughout the text. Students can complete them as many times as needed to attain their goals.
• Timed writing goals in lessons are based on what the author team considers minimum levels of speed and accuracy for a beginning keyboarding student. Note that the range of speed begins in Lesson 1 with “at least” 10 wpm/1'/3e and in Lesson 60 are “at least” 40wpm/5'/5e. So the length of timed writing and error tolerance is adjusted as skill level progressively increases through Lessons 1-120.

Skillbuilding & MAP+
 

• MAP+ generates unlimited, always-new skillbuilding drill lines for Lessons 1-18 that include keystrokes learned through each respective lesson.
• Twenty Enrichment pages are available for Lessons 1-20. Click here for a comparison of South-Western’s 18^th edition of Keyboarding and Word Processing (SW/18) coverage to McGraw-Hill’s 11^th edition of Gregg College Keyboarding & Document Processing (GDP/11) coverage.

Orientation to Skillbuilding and MAP+

Orientation to Skillbuilding and MAP+

GDP provides unlimited skillbuilding drills for remediation such as MAP+ including powerful, individualized diagnostics and other drills available via the Skillbuilding, Lessons, and MAP+ buttons.

Timed Writing & Skillbuilding Planning Grid [PDF]

All timed writings and skillbuilding available via GDP have been included on this planning grid. Suggestions for skillbuilding remediation have also been included. This grid should be useful in planning courses in which skillbuilding is the main focus. A “Results” column has been included in case you wish to record student progress.