Typing.com - New feature: assignments

New Feature: Assignments! (and much more)

Site update
Colin Spence

Amidst the disruption and uncertainty related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Typing.com knows how important online education is. As always, we’re committed to providing the best free platform for students to learn foundational technology skills. To make that easier to do in a distance-learning environment, we’ve just released some new features that will make it easier to assign, track and grade work done on Typing.com. Teachers can now assign a scope of work that appears directly on their student’s Typing.com dashboards! Let’s dive into the details…

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new Typing.com Curriculum

6th Grade Vocabulary and MLA Citations added to Typing.com!

Site update Teachers
Stephanie Calcott

You asked, we delivered…

We are always looking to improve your experience with Typing.com, so we sent a survey to all our hard-working teachers, asking what additional curriculum you would like to see added to the program. There were a lot of great suggestions, but two subjects were asked for again and again – 6th Grade Vocabulary, and MLA Citations.

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Manage Typing Lessons When Each Student Learns at a Different Pace

Digital Skills Education Teachers
Stephanie Calcott

It’s an inevitable fact of teaching that students will complete the work you assign them at different paces. Without fail, one student will finish before another student is even halfway through.

Every teacher learns pretty quickly that it’s imperative to have a game plan for what students will do when they finish their work early. It makes sense then, that one of the greatest advantages of an online program like Typing.com, is that students can work at their own pace.

Many of our teachers find that it’s useful to manage student progress by assigning specific lessons to their classes each week (learn how to assign lessons here). Assigning lessons is a good way to keep students working on the specific content you’ve chosen, and to help you keep tabs on how a given class is doing across certain skills.

So what do you do if some students breeze through the day’s lessons while others are slowly chugging along?

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Build Foundational Skills

Building Foundational Technology Skills for Lifelong Success

Education Teachers Typing Games Typing Speed
Stephanie Calcott

One question we hear from teachers regularly, is “Do my students really need to learn how to type?”. With new technology like speech-to-text, how important is it to learn proper keyboarding skills?

Very important. 

Typing is a foundational skill. Think of it like learning to tie your shoes. Of course there are slip on shoes and velcro shoes, but at some point, you will probably need to learn how to tie a shoe.

The foundational skill of typing is one that students will use in all aspects of their lives. Many students now take standardized tests online, which must be typed. The student who knows the keyboard will inevitably do better than the one who has to hunt and peck her answers out. Older students will be required to write papers, and knowing how to type will be instrumental in speeding up this process. Eventually, our students will be attempting to build a career – and it will not be easy for them to create their CV with speech-to-text technology.

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Nitro Type improves Typing Speed

Help Your Students Improve Their Typing Speed!

Education Games Typing Games Typing Speed
Stephanie Calcott

The semester (and the year) is coming to an end and it’s likely that your class has successfully worked their way through the Typing.com curriculum.  Now that they are done with their typing lessons, how can you continue to reinforce their new skill on a weekly basis? 

Wouldn’t it be great to have a typing game that is fun, builds their speed and accuracy, reinforces what they learned, and keeps them coming back for more? 

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Premium License

Five reasons to consider Typing.com Premium Licenses

Education Teachers
Stephanie Calcott

Ads can be a pain, we know! But, we want to continue to help as many students as possible to build valuable career and life skills and to give you the tools needed to guide them. To do this, we offer every piece of Typing.com completely free (and ad supported). However, Typing.com offers an ad-free experience, and for a much lower price than you might think! If you, your school, or your district is considering the purchase of a Typing.com premium license, here are five things you may want to keep in mind:

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Important Information about the Typing.com Curriculum Page

Digital Skills Site update Teachers
Stephanie Calcott

Attention Typing.com teachers! As you know, we have added an extensive digital literacy curriculum to Typing.com – including Coding, Career Skills, Computer Basics, Internet Safety, and more. And, now that we have all this great new content, we want to make sure that it’s easy for you to find and use!

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Do Keyboarding Skills Improve Student Test Scores?

Education Keyboards Teachers
Stephanie Calcott

Written by Beth Budinich – Typing.com Teacher Champion

Proficient keyboarding skills are an example of a background skill that may have quite an impact on test scores as students are doing more and more online testing. 

While it can be hard to quantify the effect it may have, there are studies that show there is an effect. Also, teachers that are administering tests speak to the benefits of their students being efficient at keyboarding. Students proficient at keyboarding also notice their ease of focusing on their writing instead of on the mechanics of keyboarding.

From the South African Journal of Education Vol. 26(2)281-293 2006, is a keyboarding study by Elsie Lubbe, Jan Monteith and Elsa Mentz called “The Relationship Between keyboarding skills and self-regulated learning”. 

This study defines keyboarding skills as: “The ability of learners to key in information into the memory of the computer with the minimum effort and energy use.” 

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