Take a look at any standard keyboard, and you’ll see its name spelled on the top letter row—QWERTY. These keyboards were designed in 1875 by Christopher Sholes and Amos Densmore who wanted to keep the most commonly used keys separated so that the typewriter’s bars would come from different directions and wouldn’t jam together. Since that time others such as Dvorak have attempted to rearrange the letters on keyboards to avoid hand fatigue because they are no longer dependent on the clacking type bars, but with little luck. Typists learned the unusual keyboard, and to this day continue to use the same configuration built for a need that no longer exists. Today children and adults probably use keyboarding skills as much or more than they use handwriting skills. Students are, in fact, required in state technology standards to be able to use a keyboard with a level of skill appropriate to their motor skill development and to their academic needs. But how can teachers teach keyboarding with so many other pressing academic needs? If you’d like to know more about teaching keyboarding skills in the classroom, read from Edutopia's Keys to the (Online) Kingdom: Keyboarding and Word Processing Resources [1] by Patsy Lanclos. This blog posting contains an array of resources for teacher-led instruction, free keyboarding programs, skill builders, and online typing tests.