For several weeks I have been volunteering on Book Night at The Road Home homeless shelter in Midvale. The lead volunteer brings in other volunteers to read stacks of library books with students whose families are in temporary housing. I consider it to be "Literacy Night" and bring my Computer Literacy materials to share with the kids.

First, I rolled out the 8 feet wide keyboard on the floor, and invited the students to sit on it while I read a book to them. It was fun to see how irresistibly they slapped or stamped on the lily pad letters. Then, I asked the younger students to locate and trace letters or numbers. With the older students, I invited them to touch the letters to spell their names and other vocabulary words as I guessed them.

Last evening I took it to the next level by putting the smaller (6 feet wide) keyboard with color coded left and right hand letters and numbers. I then placed my laptop computer on the table, just beyond the vinyl keyboard, and displayed PowerPoint images to match the shapes on the keyboard. Students had a hard time waiting for their turn as I paired them up; the student on the left was instructed to use his or her left hand to poke the letters that matched those on the screen. The student on the right was instructed to use his or her right hand to poke the letters and numbers on the right side. I was thrilled to see their enthusiasm levels with the product that I have developed.

Next week I plan to introduce the grade leveled Dolch vocabulary words, starting with the one letter words "a" and "I" followed by two-letter words, three letter words, and so on. I hope to instill a love for reading and computer literacy with these students whose families are economically disadvantaged.

Last Friday, I found myself in an Eleventh Grade business class in a suburban Salt Lake City school. An informal straw poll let me know that the students were not there for an elective; it was a required class! The teacher had left an open book test that only lasted 30 minutes for most students, but the class period was 80 minutes. It was time to get creative.

I was not able to access the Internet, but, nevertheless, I opened up my laptop computer with PowerPoint slides, showing the QWERTY Island Keys curriculum. "Take out your cell phones with QWERTY keyboards," I invited a few of the students to come forward. I then presented subsets of letters from each row of the QWERTY keyboard. "What words can you TEXT with just these letters?" They were engaged by using their left and right thumbs on their handheld keyboards. Words that they found were written on the whiteboard.

Then, as I displayed the list on my laptop, we erased the words on the board that matched those in my PowerPoint file. I then added those that the students had discovered that I didn't already have. One of my favorite right-hand-letter words was "MOON." The left hand list has always been longer than the right hand list.

I also invited a student to use the calculator on his phone to add up the value of each row of letters on the keyboard in a SCRABBLE game (I had a photo of this on  my laptop). He was amazed to see how close the score for each row came, with the bottom row adding up to the highest score! We had fun with the extra time beyond traditional testing.