I was talking with a parent of a fifth grader who is attending our local “gifted zone center” program. Her daughter was assigned a paper that needed to be two pages, double spaced. Her daughter does not type well, so this assignment was taking a while. At one juncture, the parent noticed that her daughter was not double-spacing the paper. “Oh yes, I am,” responded the student. “I am putting two spaces between each word.” Clearly, this student had not learned about basic formatting in a word processing program.

So this got me thinking – there are plenty of great typing programs out there for students, such as the BBC’s Dance Mat Typing, but are there resources (books, software programs, etc.?) that help teach word processing conventions and formatting ‘rules?’ If you know of any, I’d love to hear from you! If I come across any, I may do some field-testing and review them for you here.

- Heather