 This research project began with an in depth study of the literature on best practices in elementary touch-keyboarding instruction. Next, a survey of elementary classroom teachers was conducted to determine what components they would consider essential in a classroom-based keyboarding curriculum. A focus group discussion was then held via the internet over a three-week period, which "picked the brains" of both keyboarding instruction experts and classroom teachers who already teach keyboarding to their own students. These research methods, combined with the researcher's own six years of experience teaching keyboarding to elementary students, provided the data on which the manual and inservice training courses are based. The program was pilot tested in Spring 2000 by a classroom teacher who had never taught keyboarding before, and who used only this manual (and the included teaching materials) to conduct the initial fingering instruction, and later to incorporate keyboarding throughout her curriculum. The data from the case study of her experience is included in the report.
The underlying purpose for researching and building this new, integrated model for keyboarding instruction in the elementary school is made both necessary and possible by recent equipment innovations. Portable keyboards (sometimes called "smart keyboards"or "mini-laptops") have become available in recent years which both permit and necessitate a shift in instructional routines to foster student mastery of touch-keyboarding skills before the development of hard-to-break "hunt and peck" habits. The material produced as a result of this research is intended to serve as a companion piece to increasingly ubiquitous classroom keyboarding tools by providing needed support (resources and training) to elementary classroom teachers who are trying to incorporate their use effectively in the classroom, and to empower their students with a life skill which should be considered a fundamental literacy skill for 21st century learners.
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