The system is easy to use and combines memory techniques, music and motivational passages. Even now, for those children who write slowly and laboriously, the keyboard is liberating. Once all schools are online, smart kids who know the keyboard will have an advantage. The mnemonics are also particularly unimaginative, but re-written with children in mind, this CD-Rom could be useful. The drawbacks of this teach-yourself touch-typing are a fairly amateurish video and American mnemonics - you have to learn EDC by memorising “every dollar counts”. However, to have progressed to becoming an adequate touch-typist would probably have required a significantly greater degree of application and time than the blurb on the interactive CD-Rom would have you believe - “Almena has reduced training tie from 20 hours to 20 minutes”. To be fair, guinea pig Anna’s fingers were also aching. The latter is aimed at 8 to 13-year-olds, but the 6-year-old I used as a guinea pig managed to learn most of the 26 letters on the keyboard in two half-hour sessions before she refused to do any more on the grounds that it was too boring.

The Almena Typing Method comes in two versions - a corporate pack and a schools’ version.

Since its conception in the Eighties, more than a million students in the US, Canada and the Caribbean have benefited from chanting simple phrases like - “Run from Vicky to get Betty” - during typing lessons. But the Nineties computer revolution has increased the need for students to have more than a two-fingered relationship with the keyboard. Twenty-five years ago the only proficient typists were graduates of secretarial schools.

King-Raven developed the system 10 years ago and claims that it is possible to learn the keyboard, touch-type in only 20 minutes and reach speeds of 15-20 words per minute in less than one week. It teaches the keyboard using mnemonics, for example, the little finger on the left hand is confined to the letters QAC and these are learned as “quiet Aunt Zelda”. That said, the Almena Typing Method devised by Almena King-Raven, who describes herself on the CD-Rom as a training entrepreneur, probably does speed up the process. It is one of those skills that can only be acquired by hard work and the memorising of the keyboard by constant repetition. There is no easy way to learn to touch-type.

Almena typing lessons free