Improvements 2021

Top Improvements

On July 8, we released our annual update of Typing Pal. The biggest change took place behind the scenes: we fully replaced the servers and made significant structural changes. This major investment means that Typing Pal can now offer you even better services, and for longer. Learn more about this year’s new features below.

Improved Safety, Stability, and Performance

Major upgrades to the Typing Pal servers’ infrastructure have further improved its safety, stability, and performance. These upgrades also lay the groundwork for new improvements to be developed—look out for them next year.

Simplified Association with Office 365, Google, and Clever Accounts

When login is done with an Office 365, Google, or Clever account, Typing Pal now recognizes the associated email address and checks whether a Typing Pal account already exists for that address. For the school, this avoids the accidental creation of an additional account where one already exists. For the student, login is now completed in two clicks—no additional password needed.

Number Pad Training

Not all keyboards come with a number pad, but if you’re lucky enough to have one, make the most of it! New training texts including serial numbers, mathematical operations, decimal numbers, and whole numbers help you develop the typing skills needed for data entry.

Easier Process for Adding and Testing Out Texts

Now it is even easier for you to add your own training texts, as the special characters created by some word-processing software programs (“curly” apostrophes, hairline spaces, etc.) are automatically replaced by the universally recognized characters used by Typing Pal. Plus, you can test out your newly created activities without leaving the management interface.

Additional Details for Better Monitoring

You can view the last exercise each student has successfully completed, just by consulting the student list—handy for checking who is behind and who is ahead. The student log also tells you the number of attempts for each activity. A new filter identifies the lowest completed scores, plus you can now erase one at time to avoid unduly affecting the statistical reports.

Automatically Generated Letters to Parents

With the click of a button, create an individual letter for all the students in your group. Each letter includes the student’s name and the instructions for logging into Typing Pal, inviting parents to support their child’s training at home.

Clues For Mystery Badges

Students now receive a clue to help them collect the mystery badges. If they need more help, you can always access the solutions in the management interface. Six new challenges have also been added.

All Improvements

Technological Infrastructure

  • Full replacement of servers and structural changes.
  • Improved safety mechanisms for the software platform.
  • Modernized and upgraded application code.

Login

  • Simplified association between Typing Pal and Office 365, Google, and Clever accounts.

Student Environment

  • New section with 12 training texts on the number pad for each of the three environments (6 to 11 years, 12 to 16 years, 17 years and over).
  • Clues to help students obtain the mystery badges.
  • Six new mystery badges.
  • Improved display of data in the activity calendar. Future months can now be viewed during the first year of training.
  • Correction of a display problem in the keyboard viewer in Windows. Replacement of the Cmd key with Win.
  • Removal of extra spaces before carriage returns at the end of a line in timed texts. Greater consistency with the format of other activities.
  • Correction of an animation problem that sometimes appeared in Safari when typing errors were made.

Management Tools

  • Automatic replacement of the special characters created by some word-processing software programs (“curly” apostrophes, hairline spaces, etc.) with universally recognized characters.
  • New function to test personalized texts directly from the management interface.
  • Latest exercise successfully completed (having achieved objectives) displayed in the student list for a group.
  • Statistics on the number of attempts made by a student for an activity.
  • More intuitive sorting of badges in the student’s record.
  • More efficient loading of the student log.
  • Filter to display lowest completed scores for each activity.
  • Option to erase a chosen result.
  • Generator for letters to parents that include the student’s name, the name of the class leader, the school’s personalized URL, and the login instructions.
  • More teacher accounts displayed in the drop-down list of the form for creating school accounts.