As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching various classes on digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum through a series of blog posts. As we’ve progressed into the program, we received numerous requests from instructors and youth on activities to improve typing skills. To do this, we used a program called Typing Club which we’ll discuss below. We’ve featured this app before as part of our Connect Chicago work.
As we developed the curriculum for Youth-Led Tech, we hadn’t fully considered the basics. We drove through our lessons, which are focused on how to use WordPress to make websites for yourself and others. But we found that many youth needed more work on keyboarding skills. Since we had previously learned about TypingClub from our friends at Connect Chicago, we started an account there and set up the youth there and we now include practice nearly every day.
Introduction to TypingClub.com
TypingCub is a program that allows staff to monitor how the students are doing in real time so that staff can move over to help if they needs to. The app also keeps track of students progress throughout the course. Here’s Rene Paccha from the Spanish Coalition for Housing explaining more.
How TypingClubs Works
TypingClub is a free online program anyone can register for regardless of if they’re in a training course or not. The course has a hundred different lessons aimed at improving the users typing skill to 90 words per minute. Users can take the lessons as many times as they like with the goal of getting three ‘stars’ per level.
For schools and digital skill trainers, Typing Club has additional features to help trainers manage their programs. While students can use the software for free, to use the tool as a trainer you pay for the cost per students (about $2.60 annually per student license.)
When you sign up as a school, you get a custom domain address ( yourschool.typingclub.com) that you can send your students to. When your students arrive at your page they can register to take classes and access the content you’ve provided. As an administrator, TypingClub allows you to set up lessons plans, assign additional instructors and set up typing tests. The software also allows you to view your students progress in real time so you can walk over to the student if they’re having issues.
How to get Typing Club
For individuals, they can simply start working right away on typingclub.com without registering for the site. Registration is only necessary to be part of a class or to keep track of progress.
For schools , you can register for a free trial on the TypingClub School Page.
In practice as part of Youth Led Tech
Every day the youth spend about one hour on Typing Club. We tend to do this in the middle of the day to allow staff a chance to catch up on things. At least one staff member will monitor the youth’s progress on Typing Club to make sure that the youth are on the right site.
