Keyboarding Conundrum

In the role of Instructional Coach, it is not uncommon to hear teachers lament about students’ lack of keyboarding skills. The lament is the same in upper elementary and junior high and high school: “Our students can’t type”.

This common refrain assumes that “somebody” along the way should have subjected students to a more strenuous version of Typing Tutor or Typing.com or whatever other typing program a school might lean on.

Keyboarding falls into that extensive pile of skills related to digital learning that “somebody” should have taught the students before they got to you! But, perhaps this skill is different than many others in that pile, in that its usefulness may be relatively short-lived.

In his book, Digital for Good (2021), ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) CEO Richard Culatta, predicts that …[within the next decade] “keyboards will likely become obsolete, as voice recognition continues to improve and we become better at learning how to speak to devices”. This bold prediction does not seem far-fetched to me.

In 2022, one of the most common types of support that teachers from grades 3-12 have requested from me as an Instructional Coach is to help familiarize their students with the use of Voice to text and Text to Speech tools in Read and Write for Google Chrome. I’ve done classroom Read and Write for Google Chrome sessions at over a third of the schools in our district.

It’s not that I don’t think keyboarding is an important skill. Over my decades as a teacher, I’ve often credited my ability to type with some level of proficiency as a gateway to success in other areas such as lesson planning, leadership, and other creative ventures. Grade 10 Typing class was near mandatory at my large high school, and while I don’t recall loving “Typing 10” at the time, in hindsight, I’ve often identified it as one of the most important courses that I took. My typing course took place in a room full of typewriters, although on a few occasions, we got to go to the school’s one new computer lab and spent half the class logging into MS_Dos before completing typing exercises on a computer. Were there typing “games” back then? I wonder if my teachers at the time mused about keyboarding skills becoming obsolete?

Once schools replaced their typing rooms with computer labs, “typing” as a class was often no longer offered and any new ‘computer courses’ that were designed to replace it rarely had the same number of students registered – certainly fewer female students. And, while “computer” classes may have had a bit of typing, it lost the focus of a typing class. The ‘art’ of typing was relegated to the land of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ – a hit-and-miss skill that a few students may have been fortunate to learn, but most students missed the teacher or the class where learning to accurately type was any kind of priority.

So in 2023, many students (most students?) would clearly be more proficient at many learning tasks if they could type. (For this discussion, we won’t consider one-finger hunt-and-peck keyboard operation as “typing”.) Some of the colleagues that I most respect are hard-core typing advocates and feel that we should push for more predictable and formalized typing “plans” across our schools. Perhaps at least for right now, students would benefit from a typing blitz. They would get at least a few years use out of these skills.

In addition, our brand new (2022) Alberta K-6 Literature and Language Arts curriculum, squarely includes keyboarding (see images below). This was not previously in our K-6 curriculums. Ironically, there are no resources or even resource recommendations by the province on how to implement this. And perhaps even more ironically, just as keyboarding has been firmly added to this K-6 curriculum, so has cursive handwriting. (But of course, that’s a whole different educational debate, although I would conjecture that in our province it is in our curriculum mostly for political reasons).

Alas, as keyboarding has now been specifically added to our K-6 curriculum at a time when it might make be wise to focus more on other input methods (such as voice-to-text), it makes sense to take advantage of this mandate to help teachers and their students build the same keyboarding prowess that folks of my generation are more likely to possess. At the very least, students will be learning a skill that will serve them well for a few years. Time will tell how valuable of an investment keyboarding will be to a long-term skill set.

In the meantime, as an Instructional Lead, I will continue to promote the value of learning to voice type proficiently as this is a skill that will morph for some years as technology improves.

Investing time in learning to cursive hand write … I imagine that the schools that have continued this tradition over the years will just keep going. I wonder how schools who have dropped cursive years ago (perhaps when they decided that it was more important to teach their students keyboarding) will fit it in?