Expert answer
For writing, the best approach is still teaching good old keyboarding skills. But it can be important to have the right keyboard. Often when teachers work with young kids, they give them a regular sized keyboard, but the child’s hands aren’t big enough for a regular size, and you see their little pinky stretching all the way to the far sides to grab those keys. So you need to size the keyboard, and often the keyboards used for cash registers are really nice. They’re about half the size of regular keyboards.
In kindergarten and first grade, we definitely want to work on remediation and teaching handwriting skills, because you’re still at an early age, where students often experience a lot of growth in the developing those skills. But as we get about halfway through grade one, going into grade two, then we’re probably going to look at introducing the typing as well. So if we’re not seeing progress for those students, who may be in the bottom 20th percentile in their letter formation, then we probably want to think about getting them onto the computers. At that point, we’ll try to develop those manual handwriting skills as well as the keyboarding skills in parallel to each other.