Setting goals for yourself when you are learning how to touch type can be the most important part of the whole process. Goals are going to keep you motivated to continue your training, and they can serve as ways to measure your successes and how far you still need to go. Without goals, you cannot know how far you have come or how far you still have to go to mastering the touch typing skillset.

Goal Setting Option

Everyone needs goals in life from top-notch athletes to elementary school students. Because goal setting is so important, we have a goal-setting option on Typesy for individual, Home School, and school accounts. This can help you set goals and track progress for all of your touch typing needs.

How should you set your Goals?

After you check out the options for goal setting on Typesy’s webpage, also consider that you should set both short and long-term goals. Short term goals can be winning a touch typing game in the classroom, and long-term goals can be to improve your typing words per minute by the end of the year.

When setting your goals, consider how far you have to go and how long you have to get there, and set goals accordingly. When thinking of how to track your progress, you should also consider your skill level. Are you a beginner who should set small goals, or are you near the end of your studies and want to excel?

What metrics can you use to set Goals?

Touch typing has a few ways in which you can measure success and improvement. The most popular, for good reason, is Words Per Minute. How many words can you accurately type per minute? It is important to remember that when people are first starting out with typing, especially young kids, they are going to want to hammer away at the keyboard as fast as possible.

For the sake of long-term learning, it is always better to prioritize accuracy over speed in the beginning. It is harder to overcome bad habits that are a result of speed typing. Once your student is good at accurately typing, you and your student will find that speed naturally picks up.

Tracking Improvement

While Words Per Minute is arguable the best way to measure your touch typing success, how should you track it? Do not test this one time and then forget it. The nice thing with typing is that, unlike many things in life, it is a tangible skill that allows progress to be tracked. If you start with a low Words Per Minute, you can track it over weeks and months and watch it increase the more you practice your touch typing and improve your skills. It’s also easily and quickly measurable. Set the timer for a minute and track progress when the timer goes off.

Using Games as Goals

An added bonus of tracking goals is that you can turn them into fun games. If you are in a classroom setting, you can use “first one to a certain number of words per minute gets a prize.” It will help keep your students motivated and on track. It is fun to use both winning and losing a game as motivation for your students, and you can help keep them on track with improving their touch typing skills by setting goals for them that are attainable based on past progress.

Summary

Everyone needs goals in life! You will find that whether you are learning or teaching how to touch type, you should set both short and long-term goals. At Typesy, we can help you set goals to meet your needs!