Teachers can try out Typesy EDU for free for classes of 30 students or fewer, and accounts can be accessed through Google Classroom, Clever, and other applications if desired. The teacher dashboard is basic and easy to use for setting up students, classes, and teachers. Many settings are customizable only at the class level (not the individual student level), however. Teachers can run reports based on progress over time, study individual stats, and see where students are struggling. School- or district-wide reports need to be requested and may take up to two business days to receive. Paid subscriptions include unlimited support.
Typesy EDU is quite user-friendly. Just start your students on the initial lessons, or unlock all of them for more experienced students. Since the lessons include videos, students will need a quiet room or a pair of headphones to get the most out of the experience. Encourage them to practice at home as well. Have students try out some of the games to see which ones help them improve. Teachers can customize the text that the games are based on. The site also includes tests that can be assigned to classes, but they're short and not customizable, so teachers might want to have some separate tests that can be administered if desired.
Continue readingTypesy EDU is a comprehensive typing curriculum for classrooms, schools, or entire districts that's quick to set up and has a teacher dashboard with report options. Beginning lessons cover specific keys and combinations, while later ones include full words and sentences. Some lessons include video explanations with real hands demonstrating how to type the letters on the keyboard. In all, there are over 100 levels to complete, each with multiple exercises within them. As students complete lessons and levels, they earn status points. Teachers can assign specific typing tests for classes as well.
The lessons take students systematically through the keyboard, including the home row, top row, bottom row, shift keys, punctuation, numbers, and symbols, teaching with repetition and building on what students have already learned. After each lesson, the site displays the student's speed and accuracy for that exercise, but it disappears quite quickly. Students can see their own progress on a dashboard that graphs their typing progress over time and displays a heat map of the keyboard displaying their problem keys. Typesy EDU also includes various games that focus on accuracy, speed, and fun.
If students complete the curriculum, Typesy EDU will help them learn how to touch-type on a computer keyboard. If students make too many mistakes on a lesson, not meeting the speed and/or accuracy thresholds, adaptive learning prompts will appear. If students have done very poorly on the lesson, it will ask them to complete it again. If they were close but didn't quite make it, it will ask if they want to repeat the lesson.
Some of the games are quite repetitive, teaching the same couple of dozen words over and over again, and many have uninspiring graphics, unintuitive rules, and uneven quality, which may lose students' interest quickly. Some games also have students type words in an unusual order or with incorrect capitalization.
Typesy EDU would be improved if teachers were able to create their own tests from scratch. Tests could be made to support other lessons students are learning in their classes, and students could be tested on longer chunks of text.