The Edtech File: Episode 1 - Teaching Copy & Paste
There are many IT skills that students need to learn so they can apply them as they grow as a learner. Copy & Paste are essential skills and it often assumed that students know how to do this simple skill. It is also often assumed that the trackpad and mouse are interchangeable, when in fact they are very different skills; if a student is drawing a picture on a computer with a mouse, can they achieve the same results using a trackpad or vice versa?
I have a wall in my classroom known as the Tetris Tech Time Wall of Achievement. It is where the students can earn Tetris blocks when they achieve something wonderful, however small or big. The aim is to fill up the wall by the end of the year. The students are very familiar with the Tetris blocks.
I used this familiarity to teach Grade 1 students Copy and Paste on a computer using Cmd-C & Cmd-V (On a PC it is Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V). I created a Google Slides presentation and added 5 - 6 Tetris blocks to the slide. I duplicated the slide for the number of students in the class and put the student name on each slide. The object of the exercise was then to build a Tetris wall filling the slide by using Copy & Paste.
The presentation was distributed to the students with Google Classroom and because it was a single collaborative document all the students could see what each other was doing on the other slides.
I did observe other secondary skills during this lesson, such as moving objects around using a trackpad, spinning objects and alignment. And finally as an extension, I introduced how the students could change the colour of some of the blocks.
This was a successful lesson which achieved my learning outcome, using Cmd-C & Cmd-V to copy and paste objects on the screen.
