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Keybr is another app to help you learn how to touch type or to just improve your typing speed. Learning this now will help you in later life, it improves your efficiency when taking notes or completing normal work tasks.

The great thing about Keybr is that once you’ve started typing and gone through a game or two, it will pull all this information about how you type into a report for you to understand. It can tell you where you stand in the average typing speed of everyone who uses the app, what letters you miss the most and more.

On the reports after a couple of minutes of typing, I learned that I am in the top 3% of all users on the site, am slowest going to the I key and hit the E key wrong the most times. It’s easy to also keep track of how many days and how long you’ve been practising too with stats just for that one day and a comparison across your all time statistics.

To get started you need to create an account so it can save your progress. Once you’ve done that, head to the Settings and change the Keyboard Layout to English UK as the default is US.

You can even play a little multiplayer game against others around the world. It gives you a paragraph to type out and the fastest wins!

TypingClub is an effective way to learn how to touch type for free! In this modern world, touch typing is an invaluable tool, for a lot of jobs typing quick is key to being efficient. It can also help in your education by allowing you to type your notes quicker when in a lecture.

Although the graphics and games seem to be aimed at a slightly younger audience, it’s free and makes it easy to learn how to touch type in your web browser, you can just log in and get started straight away. Anyone can do it.

There are 678 different lessons, starting from simple tests with a couple of keys to running through a whole paragraph with minimal mistakes.

But if you don’t want to start right at the beginning, there is a Placement Test that works out how well you can type at the moment and jumps you forward to a point in their program so you’re not wasting time on things you already do. When I took this test, it took about 5 minutes and bumped me up from lesson 1 to lesson 316 so I’m almost halfway through the test already.

If you create an account on the TypingClub website you can keep an eye on your stats and monitor your progress towards becoming a fluent touch typist.

I ran through the final test while I was writing this post. I managed to get 98% accuracy, high score of 3665 and 4 out of 5 stars. If you want to give it a go, make sure you are sat at a computer then head to this link.

We’ve seen how to use Cold Turkey and the benefits of it, they also have a great tool called Writer that locks down your computer to just a basic word processor either for a certain amount of time or until you hit a set typed word goal. If you’re procrastinating and blocking the internet doesn’t quite work for you then consider Writer and lock your PC down until you hit your word count.

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