The Touch-Key Guide™, a nationally marketed computer keyboard vision shield, was developed for one purpose: to enable keyboarding instructors to stop student “hunt & peck” keying — a predictable result of unsupervised student home computer use. Today’s typical keyboarding student brings to class a self-taught non-touch keying skill whose supporting habits must be eliminated before an effective “all finger” touch system can be acquired.
Thus, current keyboarding instructors — from day one — are required to engage in intensive remedial instruction, a plague escaped by the instructors of traditional typewriting.
The single alternative to the use of a keyboard vision shield is: teacher voice commands that require the student to apply the correct finger – key associations. However, the removal of identifying letters from the keyboard keys will not rehabilitate a dedicated “hunt and peck” activist; the blank keyboard – inherited from the typewriter era – fails totally to control the student’s visual guidance of his/her fingers about the keyboard.
Should your voice commands prove adequate to convert your students from their non-touch skills, little need exists for you to employ keyboard vision shields. However, if you are burdened with poorly disciplined, self-satisfied, pre-high school — hardened “hunt & peck” performers — your classroom indeed can benefit from using the Touch-Key Guide™.