After students reach a certain level of aptitude, an excellent way to help them consolidate and develop their typing skills is to give them practice typing large volumes of text. Giving students assignments to type existing documents from the screen, printouts or handwritten pages is a simple way to accomplish this. Instead of copying existing documents, students can also practice composing and typing reports, journal entries or letters to their favorite celebrities.
Some students develop an unhealthy dependence on looking at the keyboard as they type. This can seriously inhibit speed and also makes it impossible to type while looking at the monitor. Whether students are simply sneaking an occasional peek or using the hunt-and-peck method, a simple cure is to blindfold students, then have them type spoken words or phrases. For students who are still learning the locations of keys, call out a letter and have blindfolded students call out the finger they would type it with.
An extremely useful but often neglected typing skill is facility with the number pad. Number pad exercises can be as simple as having students type a few friends' phone numbers using only the number pad. More advanced students can enter tables of numbers or even practice data entry in a chart that contains some numeric cells and some alphabetic. These more complex assignments can also be used to train students to understand when to switch to the number pad and when to use the upper row of number keys.
There is a wide variety of software available that teaches typing skills through games. Tasks within the games can range from typing single letters to difficult words or whole paragraphs, usually with a time limit. Higher speed and accuracy increase the total score, and many of the games are so immersive that students may well forget that they are in a class. Many games also provide graded difficulty levels and track each player's speed and accuracy over time, making assessment simple.