In fourth grade I had a Keyboarding class for a quarter. I was well versed with typing at that point and followed along in the class to improve even further. One day we had a typing test (complete with those goofy cardboard things that keep you from seeing the keys) where we were supposed to type a paragraph twice. I finished the test as quickly as possible and told the teacher I was done. He accused me of copy, pasting and, a little embarrassing, I hadn’t even thought of that. He made me type the paragraph two more times. I completed typing the paragraph for the fourth time and a few seconds later a second person finished. Despite my “prodigy” level (which I say very tongue-in-cheek), I’ve still found it quite interesting to measure and practice my keyboarding skills online. Here are some of the better sites I’ve found for that purpose:
If you’re looking to get past the “hunt n’ peck” method of typing and move onto touch typing, you need the full tutorial. You can find a great set of lessons for regular keyboards and Dvorak keyboards at Sense-lang.org. Their site has 15 lessons for both regular keyboard and Dvorak. There is also practice for using the NumPad and a handful of games to practice your typing.
FreeTypingGame.Net has a number of games to practice your typing as well. The games allow for you to choose a wide degree of lessons to practice select rows of keys as you learn, all of them, or even to emphasize a hand or location on the keyboard.
Where Sense-lang.org specializes in lessons and FreeTypingGame.Net is best at their variety of games, TypingTest.com specializes in giving you an accurate test for your typing speed (measured in Words Per Minute). You can take 1, 2, or 3 minute tests with 10 different topics to tests yourself. Two of the topics are derived from NY Times sports and travel headlines, meaning that they’re changing daily.
After you take the test, you’ll get the results. It will calculate your net speed by taking into consideration any errors you make during the test.
