TESOL 2004 Long Beach Presentation by Vance Stevens Lecturer of Computing at Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi

Integrating keyboarding and language skills with MS Office

Wednesday, March 31, 2004 from 10:30 to 11:30 at the Long Beach Convention Center (Room 103 A&B), in the Electronic Village EV Applications Fair http://www.pgcps.org/~esol/AppFair2004.html.

A 25-30 minute presentation, with handouts for about 20-30, conducted as 2 small group presentations during the hour long period, with participants given the chance to switch between multiple presenters.

I have my students practice their keyboarding skills in a simple typing program. I have them track the results on a worksheet I gave them which is really a printout from an MS Office Excel spreadsheet. The worksheet has space to record date, exercise number, typing speed, and accuracy for the 50 lessons in the typing program. The students then create their own spreadsheet and key in their individual data. From the spreadsheet they use the Wizard to create a line graph which lists date and exercise on the bottom and two 'series' of connected points on the graph labeled 'accuracy' and 'fluency'. They then import their graph into an MS Word memo wizard and send me a report on how they have been doing. That is, they have to create a document in the register of an office memorandum and in that memo report and evaluate their progress. Their keyboarding is then graded on their report of their progress in the memo (and language skills as well as ESP for business skills could be evaluated as well).

1. I start the students out on the worksheet you see when you click here
2. They key the data from the worksheet into Excel and produce a chart following the steps shown at this link.
3. I tell them they have to copy the chart object into a Word document and prepare a memo like this one
4. This is the rubric I use to mark the memo
5. I'm a computing teacher, so ...
   as a test of keyboarding I follow up with this quiz

This update: April 26, 2004
Address questions or comments to vstevens at pi.ac.ae http://www.vancestevens.com/