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Some of my students are using Finale Songwriter for notating compositions. Is there a way they can link it to a keyboard and digital so that they play the song and it prints it out?

I think there's a way to do that (perhaps not with Finale songwriter though I'd assume that you can): Your students may need to use a sequencer. Reaper and Audacity are two free options that will allow someone to record midi data.

But there's a catch there:

The midi sensitivity, far surpasses that of the human; this means that your students might want to play straight quarters and end up looking at a bizarre score with some tied triplets, etc. This is because your students may misperform just slightly the timing and duration of a quarter, enough for the computer to pick up the difference and feel that this is NOT a quarter but something entirely different!

Finale's website says that Songwriter allows input from a MIDI keyboard. I didn't research exactly what steps you have to take to get it to work, but apparently (at least in the current version) they have *some* way for you to do that.

I've played with keyboard input and the notation programs I've tried let me put the pitches in but I had to manually set the time values. I have Songwriter but can't remember if I tried keyboard input, NWC was a lot easier to use.

Sequencer programs let you play and they notate exactly what you played. You'll have to set quantize on to some low value or you'll get some weird results. Sequencer programs are very intimidating to me.

I do have a shareware program that notates exactly what I played. I think it is Anvil, I'm not near that PC though. I'll look tonight.