My school equipped me with a laptop; my local education authority gave me use of a portable interactive whiteboard; and I’ve even recycled a cast-off TV from a friend, finding it a new lease of life in my classroom. Yet there is one piece of kit that I have found more versatile than any of them: a wireless keyboard.
A what? I hear you cry. Well, in these days of Media PCs in our living rooms (Microsoft’s next ambition!) the number of wireless computer keyboards available has grown and prices have dropped.
The device looks similar to the one pictured (right) and it is best to get one with a built in mouseball if you can. It works wirelessly and to use it you simply plug a little accompanying USB thingummy into your laptop and away you go
Most of these devices have a range of five to ten meters – easily enough for a classroom. A writer can type on the keyboard and the result will appear on the laptop as if you were using its built-in keyboard.
I like to use it when I’ve connected my laptop to a projector. That way, the typing appears, larger than life, on my projector screen (a grand term for my classroom whiteboard).
At this point you might be wondering what all this has to do with education. Put simply, it is a terrific way to facilitate shared and modelled writing tasks. A visiting inspector saw me working with shared writing recently and commented that it was rare to see teachers doing this. He also liked the way that the authorship of the text could be swapped as simply as passing the keyboard.
Yes, I know that students can use an interactive whiteboard in a similar fashion but the wireless keyboard provides a fantastic way of encouraging reluctant writers who might be daunted by the prospect of coming out to the front of the class. I suppose that’s why I like it so much – technology is all very well but it can be intimidating and is often produced at the expense of our knowledge of people. Children (like many adults) can be daunted by a piece of kit that they haven’t had time to practise on. This is especially noticeable with self-conscious teenagers. A keyboard (wireless or not) is just a keyboard and far less unfamiliar.
One way I use this device is to offer one student the chance to ‘type up’ their work when the class are engaged in a writing activity. Thus the student effectively models their work as well as completing the task along with the others. Choose your student wisely and you can share expertise in a very elegant and seamless way.
Below is a model of wireless keyboard that I found with a quick search on Amazon. Given the number of possibilities that this relatively simple piece of hardware provides, surely every English teacher could find thirty quid from somewhere.
