TypingMaster.com offers a collection of keyboarding solutions designed to help K-12 students develop keyboarding skills. It combines both games-based and lesson-based learning as well offering free and paid plans. They have an enormous collection of resources to help students develop typing skills, and as a former computer literacy teacher who used Typing Master’s tools, I’ve seen first-hand how successful their resources can be.
Typing Master, Inc. offers several keyboarding solutions. On the education front they offer TypeTastic! a game-based keyboarding course for K-5 students. For K-12 students they offer Typing Quest, which is a web-based curriculum that includes the TypeTastic course as well.
Overall, Typing Master can be divided into three sections: 1) Typing Tests; 2) Typing Lessons; and 3) Typing Games.
The typing test is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a helpful resource to get a baseline understanding of where you (or your students) are at. You can get a words per minute breakdown and see how many errors you made during the test.
Overall, Typing Master can be divided into three sections: 1) Typing Tests; 2) Typing Lessons; and 3) Typing Games.
The typing test is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a helpful resource to get a baseline understanding of where you (or your students) are at. You can get a words per minute breakdown and see how many errors you made during the test.
The typing games are an excellent place for students to engage in fun typing practice. Typing Master has a huge collection of games that are divided between racing games and classic games.
You can also just head over to the game zone to see what’s available.
At this point, you may have noticed that there are also ads throughout the Typing Master site, which can obviously be distracting for students.
Fortunately, for K-5 they’re offering an ad-free edition for free until the end of 2017. You can check it out at edu.typetastic.com. However, teachers wishing to skip any signup and just use TypeTastic! within their classroom immediately can head over to the ad-sponsored site.
For K-12, they’re offering Typing Quest with a free 3-month trial for schools and 6 months for districts. The full Typing Quest includes the TypeTastic course as well as full keyboarding curriculum, dashboard, SSO integration, and more. You can start your free trial here.
On the paid side, teachers or schools can purchase a subscription to Typing Quest, which is a story-based lesson that students progress through while learning typing basics.
Teachers can also get detailed analytics on how their students are doing, what lessons they’ve completed, what trouble spots they’re facing, and so on. You can completely customize the lessons or activities that students will have access to, and assign different lessons so that students receive the specific activities they need.
A brand-new component of Typing Quest is TypeTastic! It offers tablet-based typing lessons, which I absolutely love.
With so many BYOD classrooms and iPad/tablet classrooms, I strongly believe that learning how to type quickly on a tablet is an important and necessary skill. Typing Master has built a series of lessons from the ground up that are specifically focused on tablet typing, which is wonderful to see.
These lessons can also be completed on a traditional keyboard, and go a long ways towards helping students gain familiarity with keyboarding basics.
There are also a large variety of new games within TypeTastic! that are built to help students build typing skills, regardless of the device they’re using. The majority of these new games and lessons are designed with K-5 students in mind, but many of them could be used at the secondary level as well.
Overall, I’m a huge fan of Typing Master. The fact that teachers can sign up for a completely ad-free version at no cost for the rest of the year is just one of the many things I love about the resource. Typing Master has a wide range of games and lessons, designed for both tablets and traditional keyboards, all of which have been built specifically for K-12 students.
If you have the funding available, Typing Quest offers detailed student analytics, but even the free version has a wide variety of beneficial activities. If you are a computer literacy teacher, or are just looking for a resource that can help students improve their typing skills, I absolutely recommend trying Typing Master.
The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I was not compensated for writing this review.
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