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"I love the iPad but I really hate typing on it. Though touch screens are magnificent for some tasks, frankly typing just isn't one of them. Maybe it's my hands and fingers fault or maybe I'm just a grouchy old school tactile typer, but I struggle to get in any kind of real workflow that involves typing more than a sentence or two on touch screens. I'm probably not the only one to feel this way, so here are six helpful tips to improve the typing and writing experience on the iPad:"

"Studies have shown that typing notes requires shallower levels of cognitive processing than handwriting, as subjects often tend to type verbatim what they hear without really engaging with its substance to the level that is required for greater understanding and better recollection. In contrast, handwriting appears to be more cognitively demanding. According to these studies,  subjects who use handwriting are generally forced to rephrase what hear into their own words, thus creating "more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session". The evidence against typing your notes is pretty compelling. And then there were tablets Tablets introduce another level of complexity to this problem, since they can be used both to type and handwrite notes. So what are we to do? Are we to avoid using the tablets and stick to pen and paper? If we do use tablets for note taking, are we to force students to handwrite notes on their tablets using a stylus? And are we to ban students from typing up notes on their tablets? After all, that is what the research appears to suggests."

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Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

"Many languages use accents and diacritic marks to change how a letter or vowel sounds. Accordingly, you may find it useful to know how to type accents and diacritical marks on a Mac using the keyboard. This should be particularly useful for users who also type or write in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Greek, but obviously this applies to many other latin language scripts as well. Modern versions of Mac OS offer an exceptionally fast way to type letter accents, and it's quite easy to use. "

Typing a document on a laptop is an annoying and frustrating experience. Perhaps, you may have noticed the cursor moving or jumping randomly, whenever you are going to type some text on a document or on a Web browser or anywhere else. It reduces the typing speed and overall performance.

"Learning to type well on the touchscreen keyboards of an iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can take some time. To speed that process up, here are a handful of great tips to make typing on iOS virtual keys much easier and faster. Some of these you'll probably know and some you probably won't, but all are very worthwhile to learn and master:"

"Despite their popularity, tablets get knocked on productivity-largely because entering data on them is slow and cumbersome. But that doesn't mean you have to boot up your laptop every time you need to type a lengthy document. From add-on keyboards to alternative on-screen keypads and general screen-typing tips, here's a host of ways to speed up data entry on your iPad or Android tablet. "

"One of my ongoing missions, despite all of the lovely hardware keyboards available, is to find a way to write comfortably for longer periods of time on the iPad. I'm actually surprised there aren't more articles out there that acknowledge that the iPad isn't really a very ergonomic setup for touch typing. I can't be the only one suffering from occasional pins and needles, or soreness from typing for too long at the tablet."

"If curriculum is the what of teaching, and learning models are the how, assessment is the puzzled "Hmmmm"-as in, I assumed this and this about student learning, but after giving this assessment, well…."Hmmmmm." So what are the different types of assessment of learning? This graphic below from McGraw Hill offers up six forms; the next time someone says "assessment,' you can say "Which type, and what are we doing with the data?" like the TeachThought educator you are."

"Last week I wrote a post about AlfaTyping which is a good site for creating and managing online typing courses for your students. Since I published that post I have received a couple of requests for other online typing instruction and practice sites. Here are some of the others that I've tried over the years. I have tried to exclude Flash-based games from the list."

"inClass is a fantastic free iPad app that students can use to take and keep track of the notes they record in all of their courses. inClass allows students to organize notebooks for each of their courses. Within each notebook students can include typed notes, audio notes, video notes, and pictures. The ability to store those four types of notes makes inClass a great app for students to use in a science lab where they might want to have a little video clip of an experiment along with their own typed notes about the lab experiment."

"I love word clouds. It is the best way to deconstruct a piece of text with students. It lets you start that conversation about language, text types, literacy and the power of the written word. It is also a great way to do a text analysis. Marco Torres talks about using them to compare two political speeches to analyse the types of words each of the candidates use but this idea would work just as easily with characters in a book, types of poems or even a series of artists you are studying."

"Looking for some powerful apps to help your kids and students type fast? The selection below features some of the most popular typing apps in Chrome app store. As usual I only picked what I think are relevant for an educational context such as the classroom. Have a look and share with your colleagues:"

"Technology has not always been my strong point. In fact, for six years I was so terrified of it that when given a SMART board for my classroom I politely turned it away. Technology cannot be forced upon teachers. They have to have their A-HA moment. Mine was spring of 2013. I begrudgingly checked my Twitter account one night (did not like Twitter) and ran across a teacher named Erin Klein. She was doing something called Augmented Reality with her 2nd graders, and I was amazed. I started looking at all of the other engaging activities that teachers were doing with students via technology, and I knew that I needed to get my tail in gear. My students deserved the same type of education. The type of education that fosters life long learners. The type of education that provokes children to question and really use those deep critical thinking skills. So late that night I taught myself how to make images come to life in my classroom using Aurasma. Aurasma is an app that creates Augmented Reality. It absolutely changed my classroom. Flipped it upside down."

"The shift and caps lock key in iOS can be toggled at will to either capitalize a word or to type out something in ALL CAPS, but using the new Quick Type keyboard, you can switch casing of existing words very easily. This works really well on the iPhone and iPad, and once you learn how to use this, it'll probably become your preferred way to capitalize a word that has already been typed out, or to switch the casing to all upper or lower case."

"Bones are rigid organs that form part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They function to move, support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells and store minerals. Bone tissue is a type of dense connective tissue. Because bones come in a variety of shapes and have a complex internal and external structure they are lightweight, yet strong and hard, in addition to fulfilling their many other functions. One of the types of tissue that makes up bone is the mineralized osseous tissue, also called bone tissue,that gives it rigidity and a honeycomb-like, three-dimensional internal structure. Other types of tissue found in bones include marrow, endosteum and periosteum, nerves, blood vessels and cartilage. There are 206 bones in the adult human body and 270 in an infant."

"I work part-time with elementary learners - with gifted learners during the school year and teaching maker education camps during the summer. The one thing almost all of them have in common is yelling out, "I can't do this" when the tasks aren't completed upon first attempts or get a little too difficult for them. I partially blame this on the way most school curriculum is structured. Too much school curriculum is based on paper for quick and one shot learning experiences (or the comparable online worksheets). Students are asked to do worksheets on paper, answer end-of-chapter questions on paper, write essays on paper, do math problems on paper, fill in the blanks on paper, and pick the correct answer out of a multiple choice set of answers on paper. These tasks are then graded as to the percentage correct and then the teacher moves onto the next task. So it is no wonder that when learners are given hands-on tasks such as those common to maker education, STEM, and STEAM, they sometimes struggle with their completion. Struggles are good. Struggles with authentic tasks mimics real life so much more than completing those types of tasks and assessments done at most schools. Problems like yelling out, "I can't do this" arise when the tasks get a little too difficult, but ultimately are manageable. I used to work with delinquent kids within Outward Bound-type programs. Most at-risk kids have some self-defeating behaviors including those that result in personal failure. The model for these types of programs is that helping participants push past their self-perceived limitations results in the beginnings of a success rather than a failure orientation. This leads into a success building upon success behavioral cycle."