First I wanted to assess their keyboarding skills. Mostly looking at accuracy rates. Not so much wpm and I am not hovering over them to see if our hands are in the correct location although I did walk around and remind students to use the home row, thumbs on the space bar only, etc. For this I decided to set up accounts for my students on Typing.com. Teachers are able to create classes and easily import students. There are a series of exercises from Beginner to Advanced. The site keeps real time records of when they sign on and what they do. For the free side, which means ads on the page, it is pretty nice. I used this site for my 6th, 7th and 8th grade students. I will introduce it to 5th and 4th grade (maybe) within the coming weeks.
For 3rd grade I wanted them to just have fun typing and Typing.com does have games on it's site but you have to wait through a video ad and it just wasn't loading very well in our lab. So one class suffered and another class go to go to BBC Bitesize Dance Mat Typing. Really cute! The second class had a lot more fun with their typing! Since we just went and started from the very beginning it starts them on the home row. Slow for some but fun for all.
I also wanted to assess what my middle school students knew about Microsoft Word. Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment turned out to be pretty cool. No account needed and no cost to take the online assessments. Just pick a module at the bottom of the page and begin. I had my students do #5 on Microsoft Word. There is audio that goes along with the assessment reading the questions. When the students get to the end, their scores are available showing them what they passed and what they had trouble with answering. The site has a higher passing score than 70 and I had my students take it until they had a passing score. Quick and easy grade for me. The site was originally designed for adults to assess basic computer skills for work. But this worked great for my purposes.
