One of the most annoying things in Word 2003 is when this ‘Create your drawing here’ box appears on your screen. You can remove it forever by going to Tools-Options, click on the General tab

There will be green tick in the Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting Autoshapes
Click in the box to remove the tick and then click OK.

When you go back to Word and insert an object there will  be no ‘Create your Drawing here’ box!

The Magic Line

Teachers of younger children often ask me how can small children learn how to type. I believe it is never too early to start keyboarding with children. Of course they can’t reach all of the letters because of their handspan and I certainly don’t expect them to be touch typing by six years old, but there are early strategies that can be put in place. Number one is getting children to use 2 hands on the keyboard.

This is where the magic line comes in. I fold small pieces of paper and stick them between the T and Y, G and H, and the B and N. I call it the magic line and that means that the right hand never crosses over the magic line to the left hand side of the keyboard and vice versa. This also works well with older students who are still hunting and pecking.

Set up a challenge that has to be completed before school in the morning. Good ones are:

• Find out what the news headlines are today (NZ Herald, CNN)
• what is the weather going to be like today (NZ Met Service)
• what happened in history this day (NZ History online, or This day in History)

These can then be reported back at the beginning of the day. (Many a teachable moment can come from these!)

Children can be timetabled to perform these tasks, if you have two on each task then all children can have a turn in one week.

When you are modeling writing on the whiteboard, have some old keyboards available for children to use. So when you are talking about using capital letters or full stops in writing you can at the same time

• How do we make a full stop on the keyboard?
  
• What finger do we use?
  
• How do we make a capital letter?

Use that teachable moment to incorporate some keyboarding skills! Don’t assume that all children know how to do it!