My Journey To Improving My Typing: Part Five

In this chapter, I’ll be reviewing my experience with typing.com, a website similar in its setup to typingclub.com. They both have lessons starting at the basics of touch-typing, the method of typing that uses QWERTY and teaches using all the fingers having specific keys to.

I recently looked back at typingclub.com  to compare the two and saw that I had barely even scratched the surface of all I could have been using on typingclub.com. As for for this article, I will be comparing it to the typing jungle lesson, which the website starts you out on.

During spring break I started using the website and attempted to get through as much of the website as I could. At one point it was a daily practice, but as we all got back into school, I’ve had less time, so it’s been longer between practice sessions.

Typing.com has three main sections: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. They have other sections that teach digital literacy and some are practice for refining skills. There are also sections that help with problems keys, which are keys that the website users tend to miss the most.

 To refine my typing and see as many aspects of the website as possible, I started from the very beginning going through almost everything. I got through beginner, intermediate, and some of the practice, and worked on my problem letters.

Just like typingclub.com, the regular lessons were not great for general practicing, just good for learning the concepts. The solution they had for this was adding a specific place to have general practice so the regular lessons wouldn’t have to get repeated. Other similarities between the two include that they both have animated videos throughout coaching, teaching, and inspiring you to keep on practicing, how to practice effectively, and take breaks, etc. They also both have several achievements to get doing various things regarding the amount of keys typed, time spent on the website, wpm, etc.

There is also another quirk I’ve realized about all the typing websites I have been trying out, and that is how it confronts pressing the wrong key in a word or phrase.

In typing.com, if you get a key wrong it lights up red and moves to the next key but if you continue to get the second key wrong it will not move to the next key until you press the right one.

In typingclub.com, if you get a key wrong, it just keeps moving on to the next keys while being highlighted in red. You can get several keys wrong in a row. Eventually, however, if you get enough wrong, it will ask you to start the lesson over again(This does not take into account the different mini games it has). 

In keybr.com, if you get a key wrong it does not move on until you press the right key and you cannot backspace. 

In monkeytype.com, If you get a key wrong it will move onto the next key, highlighting the missed keys in red until the end of a word (including punctuation) and after that it creates a space after the word and shows the incorrect keys pressed. If you do not hit the spacebar to move forward and onto the next word/punctuation it will just keep typing into the space between words.

Typingtest.com has several different typing sections: the test, the typing trainer and games. They are all set up differently and the games are a link to a different website. Therefore, a general statement for how it handles missed keys can’t be made for this one, but the test section is similar to monkeytype.com.

Typing.com has a lot of little things that I enjoyed that made the whole website a better experience. One, I loved the layout of the dashboard because it is easy to manage and find my way around. There is also an aspect where you can make an account and when you make an account you can level up with experience based on how much you type. Each new level is represented by a growing plant. It starts off as a seedling, then a sapling until it grows into a tree. There is also a feature that shows how much you have been using the website that day and it has daily goals for time. It also shows you how much of the daily goal you have completed.

There were really only two big problems I faced with the website. When I had started using the website, it was incredibly slow and laggy making it hard to use. I tried it out once before spring break to just see what it was like. Then, during spring break I went on vacation staying somewhere that was very rural with poor signal. Every day I would use the website and it would crash at least three times. However, as I used the website more, it started being less slow. I got back from vacation, back at my house and it was still crashing occasionally, but eventually it stopped and it is no longer slow. I can’t know for sure what really was going on because it seemed as though my location and signal was only part of the issue. No idea what was actually going on.

Things I did differently than with typingclub.com: I didn’t repeat lessons until intermediate and I saw that I was doing awfully. But even then I didn’t obsess over having the lessons perfected. Moving forward to complete as much as possible

While working on going through typing.com I went back to keybr.com  and monkeytype.com to continue doing my practice method with my English homework I mentioned in the previous chapter. This furthered my practice in typing but also I needed to do this in order to have the motivation to get my other homework done. It just shows how much I actually enjoyed those two websites.

My wpm has gotten slightly higher on a general average, not considering how high it was getting on keybr.com. It ranged from 48-56 wpm, leaning more toward the high side of the fifties.  It hasn’t changed much but I’ve been better at accuracy, slowing down to make sure I’m getting everything right. 

Typing.com has been great in aiding my journey into improving my typing skills with going back into the basics and I really enjoyed using it, after the problems subsided.