Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor is an excellent free application to learn touch typing, no matter the language you speak or the keyboard you use.
When you first run Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor you have to select the keyboard you are using and the language you'll use, in the case of English, choose Qwerty_en.
You can do exercises focused on different aspects: adaptability, speed, word completion, fluidity... it's a very good program if you want to to improve speed and accuracy when typewriting.
If it's the first time you use a touch typing tutor, don't worry, Klavaro Touch Typing tutor will indicate you where you have to place the fingers and the assigned keys to each finger. When you'll have done several tests, you'll be able to view your evolution in graphics.
Advantages of Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor
- Basic course: a basic type of course is available for memorizing the keys positions on the keyboard. It is supposed to be independent from keyboard layout, by the generation of random character sequences to be followed by the student.
- Fluidness exercises: with these exercises, one works typing complete paragraphs, with good sense sentences. Typing errors aren't accepted: the user must correct them with the backspace key before be allowed to go on. Especial attention is given to the typing rhythm, which must be as uniform as possible. Just like the velocity exercises, this one here makes possible to load any text files, independently of language.
- Keyboard layout editor: makes possible to configure the keys' positions and to save the result in a simple text file. If your keyboard isn't shown above, you can create it. If you need to do it, please let us know about.
- Clean graphical interface: when learning to type correctly, one must not get the attention off the exercises. So, it isn't recommended neither to have dozens of gauges measuring velocity, errors, time, etc; nor a virtual keyboard floating in front of the student: he/she must memorize the key positions by the tact, not visually. Hence, Klavaro's interface started simple and will remain like that for all of its lifetime.
- Progress charts: at the accomplishment of each exercise, some characteristics of your performance are saved and can be showed graphically. Thus, you can easily observe your learning progress (or regress).
- Adaptability exercises: these exercises use all the keys ramdonly, so that you can practice using all the keyboard. It's named adaptability exercise because it develops the capacity to adapt your typing skills to any kind of strange words that may appear in some texts.
- Velocity exercises: one achieves velocity on typing when the environment is well known, or, when the words come from one's own language. That's why these exercises focus on velocity. And even if your language isn't supported by the application, you still can indicate texts in any language to include the words contained there.
- Semi-online contest: for the last training module (fluidness), there is a scoring scheme to rank users accordingly to their touch typing skills. The ranking is done only locally, for users in a shared machine, or it may be enabled to send the local data to a web server, where they will be proccessed and a global ranking will be publicly available. This last case can be applied only in Linux based systems (see Requisites). Then the program would be running as an "online" game.
- Including other texts: facilities to import extern text and use them with the advanced modules (velocity / fluidness). You can launch an usual dialog to select a local file of the system; you can paste text already copied to the clipboard; and more, you can select, drag and drop text at the entry box in the bottom of the tutor window. This two last facilities work, for example, with text selected in your browser, from any prefered page of yours.
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