have you used open source typing tutors in a classroom setting?

[Jeffrey LePage]

A few weeks ago I asked about teaching typing with open source.  The consensus choice seemed to be ktouch.  I can now report that ktouch, at least the kde4 version, does indeed fulfill most, if not all, of our needs.  Ideally, we would like ktouch to offer fingering diagrams in addition to color-coded keys.  However, we can live without that feature.

I was not present at the first ktouch lesson, but I was told by several of the children that the lesson went extremely well.

A few notes...

The kde4 version is prettier than than the kde3 version, and
includes support for user logins.  We don't run kde, but the necessary kde libraries loaded without fail and worked just fine within gnome, openbox, and xfce.

We did have some problems:

   a) kids tend to hit numlock and capslock a  lot.  This causes typing
programs to _seem_ to malfunction because the users think they're typing 'a'
when they're really typing 'A'.

   b) kids also tend to mouse-click on the desktop or another window,
and so de-focus the ktouch window.  This of course causes keyboard
input to go somewhere beside the ktouch window, and the kids think the
program has locked up.
   c) problems a and b also tend to confuse the teachers.

   d) on slow systems the ktouch window must be delicately sized.  The lesson text is displayed in a sliding text window.  If
the lesson text is wider than the window, then the text flows off the
right side of the screen.  As the user types, the text moves to the
left.  The problem is that this text sliding process is too slow on old systems and the program can't keep up with the typist.  However, if you resize the window such that the lesson text fits completely within the window, then the problem goes away.
   e) not surprisingly, ktouch starts rather slowly on our old laptops.  However, once it starts, it runs quite smoothly.  The memory footprint is actually quite small, and the CPU load even smaller.
  

If you're interested...
We are doing our typing lessons using laptops made in 1999.  They have 256MB RAM and a PentiumII running at 400MHz.  They are running Xubuntu 8.04, but with the openbox window manager rather than XFCE.  Despite their limitations, and despite the daily abuse they suffer at the hands of our elementary school children, they still perform fairly well.

-- 

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--- On Thu, 1/29/09, Onatawahtaw <onatawahtaw at yahoo.ca> wrote:
From: Onatawahtaw <onatawahtaw at yahoo.ca>
Subject: Re: have you used open source typing tutors in a classroom setting?
To: , "Jeffrey LePage" <jeffrey_lepage at yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 9:04 AM

--- On Tue, 1/27/09, Jeffrey LePage <jeffrey_lepage at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yes, I've looked at all the usual suspects (tuxtype,
> etc.), and they all fail to impress my teachers.  
> 
Can you be more specific as to what you mean by "usual suspects"? Not
sure if that includes KTouch, but I've used KTouch and it works fairly well.
It is included in the Edubuntu package by default. Also, what fails to impress
the teachers? Is there something in particular that they are looking for?

-Kevin






      
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