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.