I recently learned about and signed up my school for the Typeracer for Schools and have been delighted with its ease of use and account set-up; its racecar/words per minute format; and most of all, the eagerness and excitement that my 6th, 7th and 8th grade students get from participating in this keyboarding game. These are students with a typing rate of as low as 10-12 words per minute, to up to 80 words per minute. And, yes, within a relatively short time of using the site, I am seeing an improvement in my students’ keyboarding skills and words per minute speed - with no drudgery or complaints on their part, I might add!
Another feature that I particularly like about the Typeracer for Schools site is that students aren’t just typing individual words; they’re typing sentences complete with commas, exclamation points, dashes and quotation marks. And, better yet, these sentences are from reading materials that they have read at school. As the teacher in charge of the typeracer school account, I can enter short or long passages and/or sentences from specific novels or poetry that students have read that then they will type in their races. Or, if you as the teacher don’t have time to enter specific sentences from your own curriculum, students will be typing from the thousands of sentences/passages that the typeracer site provides for you. These lines are level-based, and in a short time, the site will recognize what level a student is typing at, so it will provide either a more difficult or easier passage, depending on the student’s rate of typing.
It appears from the levels that I’ve seen on Typeracer for Schools, young elementary typists to high school/college age students can all find content and typing levels that will be appropriate and suitable.
Typeracer For Schools is a keyboarding teacher’s dream! But, most of all, as I mentioned earlier, the students LOVE it! I have many students who want to return to the site even on their own at home at night whether or not I assign it as 15 minutes a night homework. One fun feature is from home at night they can notify their friends that they are on the site and can send them the URL to the exact “racetrack” that they are on so they can race against each other! They love that feature!
You can also imagine my delight as an educator when the students finish a race and learn on their screen that the book passage is from Gary Paulsen’s, “Hatchet,” or Lois Lowry’s, “The Giver,” or even some whimsical lines from Dr. Seuss. I hear, “Oh, that was from “Holes!” We just read that in our Language Arts class. I loved that book!” A short conversation by others who were in the same race often follows – “Oh, remember how those boys were sent to dig those holes all over the place?” “Yeah, what was the thing with the onion juice?” Another student will pipe in, and a brief little discussion and review of one of their middle school readings takes place - a moment for their teacher to take pause and smile.
“Yes, they were paying attention when they read that book and now they are to their keyboarding! Thank you Typeracer for Schools, for adding some fun and excitement to our learning at school today!!”
