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Typing.com
Pros: Helpful performance data gives teachers and students a clear sense of progress. Games and choose-your-own-adventure stories keep it fun.
Cons: Distracting banner ads mar the free version; most of the best features are only available with paid subscription.
Bottom Line: Especially with a paid subscription, an engaging way to boost typing skills and track student progress.
After you set up a free account, check out the robust teacher dashboard where teachers can create unlimited classes with unlimited students, teachers, and administrators. Choose your students' grade level and try out the typing lessons yourself, getting a sense of the keyboard practice tests that focus on specific letters and more advanced lessons where students learn simple information (like pointing to the names of a computer monitor and mouse) and even digital citizenship content (like how to combat cyberbullying). Consider how you might integrate typing practice into your existing lesson plans, and peruse the teacher curriculum PDFs.
Check out the custom lesson creation tool, too: There are strong guides to help teachers create manageable, meaningful customized typing practice for their students. To add extra cross-curricular benefits, teachers can create custom lessons and typing tests with their custom content, perhaps building on a history lesson or revisiting insights from a science lab.
If your school or district doesn't spring for the paid subscription, talk with your colleagues about whether Typing.com is a good fit: The banner ads that appear on the free account are random and distracting.
Typing.com is a web-based platform that provides dozens of free, informative typing lessons from beginner through advanced levels. Students test their skills with keyboarding practice exercises that eventually expand to words, sentences, and paragraphs. As they progress, students can see their word-per-minute (WPM) and accuracy percentages and star ratings. There are also brief timed tests, after which students can print completion certificates. Students can select a theme to customize their experience and they can play through a series of games while they practice and hone their skills. There are also choose-your-own-adventure modules where students practice typing and select what happens next in an interactive story.
In addition to the step-by-step keyboarding lessons, the platform features adaptive, targeted problem-key practice and practice options for specialized keyboards (like 10-key and Dvorak) and content (like medical terminology). There's also additional content with special lessons on how to use a computer, online safety and behavior, time management, formatting correspondence and reports, and coding essentials, introducing students to HTML and CSS. These extra lessons include a mix of instruction, quizzes, and typing practice.
As students progress, their avatars level up and they earn badges for typing speed, accuracy, and more. Kids can see their own stats, helping them track their own progress and keep tabs on their problem keys. They can also view a class scoreboard to compare progress with other students. Meanwhile, teachers can create custom lessons and tests and assign them to their classes and (with a paid subscription) to individual students. Teachers can set up classes either manually or by syncing with Google Classroom, Clever, or ClassLink. The teacher dashboard has tons of customization options, both in terms of looking at student stats and tailoring what students can and can't see or do, as well as creating custom lessons and timed tests. Teachers can access detailed reports on several measures of student progress, and they can monitor realtime student activity with a paid subscription. Accessibility features include lessons available in both English and Spanish, video transcripts, and text-to-speech dictation support.
Free teacher and students accounts feature extensive banner ads on every page; the paid subscription removes those ads and offers additional features.
Typing.com's flexible, detailed lessons are a good fit for K-12 students, providing instruction for beginners through those needing more targeted, challenging practice. It's great that this is more than an adventure in rote typing practice: Practice lessons include typing the most-used English words and a personalized practice section based on students' most troublesome letters. There's also an impressive amount of encouragement along the way, from friendly language introducing each lesson to the badges and experience points (XP) that students earn as they progress through lessons, games, and tests. It's also great that students have easy access to their own data, helping them review and understand their progress.
In general, the only real disappointment with this tool is the difference between the free version and the paid subscription. The rotating banner ads are really distracting, and it's too bad that some of the very best features for differentiating instruction and tracking student progress are only available by subscription. Even with limited features, free access to Typing.com would be a powerful classroom tool, but it's a much better tool with the premium features.
Learning Rating
Great Resource for Basic Typing Skills
This tool is very useful for students to learn basic typing skills and how to use a keyboard effectively. I love that there is a multitude of games for students to play that allows them to select a favorite to stick with or pick and choose between the options if they prefer variety. I also like that it is very customizable. Students can pick the difficulty in the games they play to practice and teachers can pick the difficulty of the lesson assigned to their classroom. It is also very engaging with students being able to meet a daily goal, see their average typing speed, and grow a plant by earning experience points. The only downside is occasionally there will be a distracting advertisement or two, like the description on Common Sense Education says.
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