Free Typing Programs Online to Practice and Improve Productivity

I remember my childhood days of learning typing some 25 years back on a clackety clack typewriting machine. Literally one has to pound on the keys to get those impressions done on the paper, has to put some whitener to hide those mistakes or has to scratch the mistakes to powder, oh my good old days! Now I can see those typewriters only in some orthodox government offices and with some oldies. Things have changed so much in these last 20 years, computers have taken up everything and internet has wired us in a global village. No whitener, no erasers, all have become eco-friendly, using hardly any paper, felling less trees? On the hard side, I have forgotten my handwriting; my hands are shivering when I grasp the pen now. Oh Jesus, have I become old? No, not at all. My fingers are always on the computer keyboard nowadays, no wonder, I may end up practicing handwriting again.

Ok, I have forgotten my handwriting but how about my typing? If I stick to editing/QA making those beautiful looking reports of new MTs ugly with colors of track changes, then I’m losing my typing speed too! Just being curious to know my typing speed, took some online tests and scored only an average of 50 wpm. If you are good at mathematics and statistics, you may argue to increase my speed by performing some calculations; okay, I could hear you yelling when I speak of mathematics, I will show you the benefit of increasing my typing speed to 65 WPM.

I type around 50 hours a week if I do just transcription alone and if I could increase my speed to 65 WPM at 95% of typing accuracy, I would save:

• 1.6 hours a day
• 11.5 hours a week
• 51.1 hours a month
• 601.6 hours a year

Oh! That’s a whopping 25 full days a year. Equate this 601.6 hours to number of working days assuming 8 hours of work a day, i.e., 601.6 divided by 8 gives you 75.2 days of working days! Think of converting this extra time into money or holidays! Hence the more your typing speed, the more you earn as a medical transcriptionist; of course, the other factors like clarity of dictation and dictating speed of the doctor could also influence your typing speed.

Practice makes a man perfect. So I’m sharing with you some online portals where you could just start from learning or practice more to sharpen your typing skills.

Steno Speed: Steno Speed is a website conceived and designed for typists, stenographers and transcriptionists, among others. You can use the sound file library to practice typing or build skills to pass employment and certification tests. Steno Speed has a collection of sound files which are arranged by speed. Some files have accompanying text. Most are timed dictation, but some are actual live recordings. The files are in streaming audio format so that you can hear them when you click the link. In order to hear the sound files, all you need to have is the Free RealPlayer installed in your system. Steno Speed’s live and dictated sound files range in speed from 40 to 230 words per minute. For transcriptionists, you need to just open your word processing application and type as you listen to the dictation. It’s just a simple and useful site for transcriptionists and medical transcription job aspirants. Overall, it is absolutely free.

I couldn’t find any dictated voice files in the rest of the sites below for you to practice typing. They have just text files and/or lessons.

Alfa Typing: Alfa Typing provides full typing study course free in two languages – English and Russian. There are 60 lessons in English. All these lessons have their recommended results to be achieved, in terms of WPM and accuracy though no strict rule is there to stop you to moving to the next lesson before you achieve results of current lesson. It’s free but you have to sign up with them if you are satisfied with their demo.

ARTypist: Artypist is an online web portal that helps you to learn touch typing or improving your typing skills. By doing their typing courses, your typing speed will increase notably. They promise you to not only boost your typing speed but also to make you avoid typing wrong characters. If you are interested you could register and access the typing courses that are absolutely free, but you could also access as a guest without registering.

Good Typing: Good Typing offers 27 guided lessons to learn step-by-step from the beginning with the choice of eighteen different keyboard layouts to learn typing correctly in just a few hours using all your fingers. Registration required to maintain the continuity of the lessons learnt.

Keybr: Keybr offers to train you to type at the “speed of thought!” You can choose from three basic lessons that start with a certain number of keys on the keyboard, and then, as you progress through the lessons, more keys are added to the mix to make things a little tougher. It keeps live track of all your mistakes and your words-per-minute (wpm), and even creates graphs of your performance. Once you find that the lessons have nothing left to offer you, get ready to play with custom mode, where you can edit the text that you want to practice. You can import the content of a web site or blog into Keybr to type it out. For example, you could try importing the articles of MT Herald or CNN news. This way you can develop your typing skills better.

Learn 2 Type: Whether you’re a typing expert or just a “hunt & peck” beginner, the interactive exercises in this typing tutor automatically adjusts to your skill level. The better you get, the more challenging the typing exercises become. You can take the breaks as you please and pick up the typing lesson where you left off once you are back.

Peter’s online typing course: You can begin with Peter’s online typing course, a minimalist one without any bells or whistles. No need to register or provide your identity or any such sorts of marketing gimmick, you could have a humble beginning from zero. The only requirement you need to have is the free Adobe Flash Player already in your system.

Power Typing: Power Typing is an online free typing tutor for Qwerty – the US standard 101 keyboard and Dvorak keyboard – the US alternative ANSI standard keyboard. Separate lessons are available for Dvorak and Qwerty, which enable typing of whole words pretty soon on both keyboards. While learning through the lessons in sequence, you also rehearse the keys already along with adding new ones. Instructions for hand positioning over keyboard are also included in the lessons.

Quazart: Quazart is a free online tool for keyboarding skills development, which was originally made for students at Colegio América in Peru and opened to the world since 2003. Registration is required and your account will provide you a record of your goals and progress. Don’t be worried about sharing your email address because this site will never ask for your email address while registering for the lessons.

?The UgLY TypInG PrACtice ProGrAM: This free program specializes in speed drills for punctuation, numbers, and symbols. Though it looks like something the cat dragged in and the typing/keyboarding practice words like complete nonsense and lacking beauty, it helps you become a master typist as it is designed as a supplement to a complete typing program. It is intended to provide focused practice for characters that you need more practice on.

Type Online: Type Online offers a structured touch typing course for motivated individuals looking to develop their keyboard skills. The author claims Education Network Australia (EdNA) has assessed Type Online and judged the offering to be a quality educational resource.

Typing Dvorak: This course in Flash includes all 29 lessons of Dan Wood’s “ABCD – A Basic Course in Dvorak.” You can map your Qwerty keyboard to Dvorak in the program by just clicking a button, so you don’t need to change any system settings. You can keep an eye on current WPM, CPM, and percent completed live during the lesson. Though we medical transcriptionists may not be interested in practicing in Dvorak keyboard, it serves the purpose for those in need.

Typing tutor-online: This is a javascript typing lesson web application developed by Egbert Beuker. Apart from Typing tutor-online, he has placed this application on several other portals like Typing lessons-online and Typing course-online.

Typing Web: Typing Web’s typing tutor is a completely free for individuals, online typing tutor & keyboarding tutorial where all skill levels can benefit from free keyboarding lessons. Engaging content keeps things interested, including daily news headline lessons. Registration required.

Finished practicing? Got well versed with the keyboard? Confident? Ok. Find out how much time do you still waste by not optimizing your typing speed at Typing Web or check your speed and race against those ultraspeed experts at Type Racer.

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