In grade three this year, your child will be learning the basics of touch typing. At school and at home, we will be using the program Typing Web (www.typingweb.com/tutor), along with various web-based keyboarding programs (which can be found here). For maximum growth, students should be practicing their keyboarding at home for approximately 20-30 minutes per week (think 10 minutes per night, 2-3 times a week). Here's a great article on how to motivate kids to improve their touch-typing skills.
In comparison to show the benefits of touch-typing, here is a chart which shows handwriting speeds in various ages along-side keyboarding speed:
We recommend Firefox or Safari. Other browser may also work. If you are having trouble getting the typing program to load, please try a different browser.
Use your regular school username which is your last name and ID number.
Use your regular school password. Remember the capital letter.
When the lesson is loading, an advertisement appears on the screen. Do not click on it.
There are also advertisements along the side and top of Typingweb.com. Practice being safe online by not clicking on them without your parent's permission.
Click on Statistics for a selection of graphs and other data about your typing.
Try to practice at least 2-3 times per week. Work on lessons, not games for at least ten minutes per session. Your teacher may assign typing on certain days or for certain amounts of times.
If your teacher has it turned on, you can view your class scoreboard. The scoreboard resets each week. That means each week someone else can be in the top 5 slots. You can view the scoreboard ranked by typing speed or by time spent typing.
There are 12 different typing games. The typing games do not count towards your total time spent typing. The games may use keys you have not yet learned to type. You may have to uncover the keyboard to play them.
When you are done typing, log out. This is especially important in our Mac computer labs.
If you have trouble with TypingWeb.com, please try these steps with your parents' assistance.
1. Refresh the page.
2. Restart the web browser.
3. Try a different web browser.
4. Restart the computer.
5. Make sure your browser is up to date. Download the most current copy.
Parents: If your child is having trouble logging on, contact their classroom teacher for a copy of your child's username and password.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Mr. Ferrell