Techlearning blog

Keyboarding is an important skill. I reflected a bit on cursive and keyboarding on the TechLearning blog a year ago this month in the post, "The New Cursive." Perhaps my comparison of cursive writing to keyboarding was not appropriate. The relevance of cursive to successful living was and is arguably much more tenuous than the relevance of keyboarding skills to success in our digitally connected environment. In any event, I continue to think keyboarding is a very important skill and one in which we should encourage students to not only practice but develop outstanding proficiency.

With these ideas in mind, I was delighted to discover the keyboarding game website Typeracer this evening. The website allows web visitors to race other people "live" on the site or set up individualized races with friends with an invitation code. Depending on how many people are online when you choose to start a new race, a number of different people will appear in your browser race window with unique car colors:

Users can choose to show only a single line of text or several lines, and if they choose to register for a free account the website keeps track of best WPM races ever, average WPM statistics, and other numerical indicators of keyboarding proficiency:

Rather than oral spelling tests, which have little relation to the skill set required in the world of work outside of school, I think schools should offer opportunities for public keyboarding contests. The website Typeracer certainly provides an engaging and challenging environment for practicing keyboarding skills. There are some advertisements on the site, but none of the ads I saw appeared to be inappropriate for school contexts.

I maintain a social bookmark list of other keyboarding game websites on delicious.com. Consider showing this website to your students in upcoming weeks, and challenging them to race you head-to-head in a keyboarding contest!

Thanks to Chris Wyatt in his latest TiPS - Technology in Public Schools podcast with Wendy for bringing Typeracer to my attention. :-)

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keyboarding, typing, keyboard, type, game, gaming, online, contest