Author: Tore Olsson, Education Outreach Coordinator Revision December 12, 2016 STEP 1 - SIGNING UP

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1 Getting Started With TypeRacer S chool Edition Author: Tore Olsson, Education Outreach Coordinator Revision December 12, 2016 You can begin using TypeRacer in your classroom in just a few minutes, after following the three simple steps described in this guide. The first step is to sign up and choose your pricing package. Second, you will create your own TypeRacer universe and configure it, choosing the texts that your students will type. Lastly, you will invite your students to join the universe, and let the racing begin! Please read the following directions carefully. If you need assistance with any part of the sign-up or universe creation process, please don t hesitate to contact us at support@typeracer.com. A TypeRacer Universe is a separate version of the typeracer.com website which is accessed through its own unique URL. It has all the same functionality as the typeracer.com website but has a distinct set of texts and users (for example, the high scores will show only the users who are signed up for that universe). As an administrator of a TypeRacer universe, you will have full control the texts which are to be typed by the users as well as other settings. STEP 1 - SIGNING UP Please direct your web browser to the TypeRacer School Edition signup page, located at and click on Subscribe. You will be prompted so sign in with your Google account (for your convenience, you will be using a Google account to administer your TypeRacer universe). You might already have a Google account if you ve used Google services such as Gmail. If not, you can sign up for your free Google account right from the Google login page or by going to Note: your students will not be required to use Google accounts only you, the administrator. Once you are logged in, choose a billing package that suits you best. TypeRacer uses PayPal (the safe and easy way to pay online). The PayPal service will ask you to create your free PayPal account if you do not already have one, and then it will let you subscribe to TypeRacer using your preferred billing method (debit and credit cards are accepted). A word on billing. Our introductory price offer is the Single Teacher/Classroom subscription. With this package, an individual teacher acquires one private universe with a maximum of thirty-five students one classroom, essentially (and if you need more accounts, we ll be happy to accommodate). The first month of subscription is $1; after that trial month has expired you will be billed $79 for a one-year contract. If you do not want to continue your subscription after the first month, simply log on to PayPal and cancel the TypeRacer subscription before the month ends. We have deliberately set the price very low because we understand that many individual

2 teachers will be paying for it out of pocket but we also believe that as more teachers do so, school systems and administrators will take notice of the revolutionary potential of TypeRacer and adopt it on a much larger scale. But it all begins with forward-looking, inventive teachers to start that revolution such as yourself! If you can convince your principal, school district, or state to adopt TypeRacer on on a larger scale, we will be happy to offer generous volume discounts and refund your initial out of pocket expense. Once you have completed the payment process, you will be directed to the TypeRacer administrator sign-up page. Enter your name, title, organization name, postal address, and phone number. This will register you with TypeRacer as a certified administrator, and qualify you to receive technical help from the TypeRacer staff. This information is private and will only be used to contact you about any potential issues with your service. Next, click on Sign Up! and you ll be ready to create and configure your TypeRacer universe! STEP 2 CREATING YOUR UNIVERSE When creating your universe, the first step is to choose a code (or URL ID) that will serve as its web address. The URL ID cannot contain any spaces, special characters, or upper-case letters, and should ideally be kept short, to allow your students to easily find your universe. You will also be able to provide a longer display name for your universe. For example, the display name of your universe could be Ms. Brown s class, and a a suitable URL ID could be brownclass. Once you have entered a URL ID and display name, click on Create this universe. You will then be given the web address for your universe, which is the same one your students will later need to join. In this example, the resulting URL for Ms. Brown s imaginary classroom would be Continue to the next screen ( Settings ). Here you will decide whether your TypeRacer universe will be private or public. A public universe means that any internet user can log in and race; a private universe requires a unique password to log in. For the purposes of classroom use, it would make sense to make your universe private, though you can change this setting later on if you wish. If you decided that your universe should be private, the next option you will see is your universe s Group Access Code this is the password that all users (that is, your students) will need to gain access to your private TypeRacer universe. You will notice that a four-character password is already in the box; feel free to use this randomly-generated password or make up your own. You will have to provide this code to your students so they can enter the system and start racing. When you re done, click Apply Changes, and you will see that your settings have been saved. Now your universe is online but it s not quite ready yet. It s missing the vital

3 ingredient to any TypeRacer universe a set of texts! In the administrator screen (which you re currently in), notice the five tabs on the top of the screen, which read Settings, Texts, Users, Administrators, Billing, and Help. These are your main administrative controls, and in the following section you will learn how to use each one to tailor your TypeRacer universe to your specific wants and needs. Let s begin with Texts, so that you can get your universe ready for racing. Click on the Texts tab, and you will be taken to the Texts administrator screen. Notice the five orange, underlined tabs on top, which are your main tools for regulating the universe s texts. Right now, you re looking at your active texts and as you can see, there aren t any selected yet. There are a number of ways to add texts, and we will start with the simplest way to do so which is to add texts from the TypeRacer database, a built-in repository of texts with over five hundred quotes from books, songs, movies, and more. To add texts from the TypeRacer database, click on the orange tab titled Texts you can add. This page shows you a selection of text lists, each containing a long list of texts. On top of the page, you can select a text list to display and the individual texts in that list will be displayed in a large table below, which shows you details such as the author, source, and skill level for each text. You can choose to add all of them, with the add all texts from this list button, or choose individual texts with the add buttons in the left hand column of the table. Once you ve added texts, you can click on the Active texts tab and you will see a list of the texts you added, now available in your universe. If you are happy with the pre-selected texts and want to learn how to invite your students now, skip ahead to Step 3 Starting a Classroom Race. Otherwise, please keep reading this section. The built-in database of texts can be convenient for launching a universe quickly, but the true power of TypeRacer School Edition lies in your ability to create your own texts, group them by topic in lists, and rotate those lists for your student racers. Here you will learn how to create your own text, create a text list (more on that later), add your texts to text lists, and finally manage your text lists. When you re ready to type up a new text of your own choosing, please read the following paragraph. To create your first TypeRacer text, click on the orange link titled Create a new text under the Texts tab. Fill out the form, choosing the media type, entering the title, author, and language. Depending on the length of the quote, TypeRacer will suggest a skill level which you can either accept or change but don t worry about this too much right now. Also, if you wish, you may enter the 10-digit ISBN-10 number (without dashes) so that information about the book and a picture of the book cover will be available after the race is over. You may also choose to make the text public or private: if a text is private, only the administrators on your account will be able to use this text. If you choose to make the text public, however, any TypeRacer administrator anywhere across the world will be able to add and use your text in their universe. If you are comfortable with it, we encourage you to make your texts public, so that other

4 teachers might use the texts that you ve deemed worthy for students. Once you re finished, save the form, and you ll see a confirmation that your text was saved and is now available in your TypeRacer universe. And if you click on the orange tab titled Texts you own, you ll now see your very first text available! Using the same simple step you just did, you can add as many texts as you want, and then add or remove them from the universe s active texts using the buttons Add or Remove in the left-hand column. For some teachers, this will be enough for a productive classroom TypeRacer experience. But TypeRacer School Edition also gives you the ability to create groups of individual texts, or text lists, which can be organized by theme or topic and then easily rotated in and out of your universe s active texts. Think of them as a sort of playlist made up of individual texts. For example, if you want your students to type texts from books on American history and plant biology, but not at the same time, you can create two separate lists of texts and then switch them easily. To use TypeRacer s text list feature, first you must create a list. In the Texts screen, click on the orange tab titled Manage your text lists, and you will see a form for creating your first text list. Choose a title for example, American History, for our first set of texts coming from history books. Then choose a language, and the minimum age required for users (we encourage you to set this age threshold as low as possible, like 5, unless you ll be using texts with content only appropriate to older students). Just as with an individual text, you can make your text list public or private. Then click Create text list, and you will see a screen confirming your list s creation. Click to continue, and you will now see your first text list appear in the tab Manage your text lists. To add any text to your new text list, click on any of the tabs which display texts (such as Active texts, Texts you own, or Texts you can add. In the column to the far right, you will now see a drop-down toolbar for each text with all your available text lists. Choose the list that you want (if you have more than one text list), and simply click add. You may add as many texts as you like to any list, and you can add a text to more than one list. Once you ve added the texts you want to a text list, you ll want to learn how to select text lists for use in the universe s active texts. To choose a specific text list, first make sure that there are no other active texts by clicking on the orange tab active texts, and removing any other texts that may be active. Then click on the orange tab Texts you can add. Notice that the table is now only showing the texts from your first list. To add all of the contents of this list to your active texts, choose option 1 Add all texts in this list. To remove that list s texts from the active texts (but not permanently!), choose option 2 Remove all texts from in list. We should also mention that text lists are not mutually exclusive. Your set of active texts may include any number of texts from any number of lists and may also include texts which do not belong to any list. Now you know how to create texts, create text lists, and cycle text lists in and out of

5 your universe s set of active texts! These are the basic skills needed to administer a TypeRacer School Edition universe. The rest of this section will explain other administrative capabilities, but if you re ready to put your texts to work in a classroom race, skip ahead to Step 3 Using TypeRacer in a Class. On the top-most blue tab, you will notice a few other options: Users, Administrators, Billing. Each will help you fine-tune your TypeRacer Universe, and there is an additional tab called Help, where you can go to get help with using your control panel. The Users tab will reveal the users registered to race in your universe your students once you invite them to join. The Users feature is important because it allows you to review your students progress how many races they ve tried, their average typing speed, etc. The Administrators tab will allow you to invite other teachers to become administrators of your universe simply enter their address to sign them up. The Billing tab gives you the details of your billing set-up, with information on pricing, universes used, and number of user accounts. Lastly, the Help tab is home to this user guide and other tips and tricks for making your TypeRacer experience smoother and simpler. STEP 3 USING TYPERACER IN A CLASS Once you ve started a universe, created and chosen its texts and/or lists, inviting students is the easy part. Simply write your universe s URL (which, if you ve forgotten it, is available if you click on the blue Settings tab in your administrator console) on a blackboard, along with the Group Access Code that they ll need (also available in the Settings tab), and they ll be ready to log in. To set up accounts, your students will only need to enter their first name (for their last name, just the initial is fine), a login name, and a password that they choose, along with the Group Access Code no other information is required. Once they do that, they ll be ready to race other students using the texts you ve selected for them. When students enter your universe, they will have three options. The first, and the one which they will most commonly use, is Enter a typing race, shown in large, bold font. When students choose this option, they will enter into a race of up to seven competitors, who are chosen because their skill level most closely matches that of the student. Therefore, your class will be divided into separate races of eight students or less, grouped by their WPM (words per minute) averages and skill rating. The second option is a practice race, which allows the student to race without competitors using the universe s texts. Lastly is the Race your friends option, which allows users to

6 create a private race and invite their friends to it by sending them a unique URL. In the bottom half of the students racing screen is the high scores section, which displays the latest high scores, the results of the last ten races the student has finished along with a graph of their speed, and the fastest typists of their TypeRacer universe. Also, when students complete a race, they will see the highest score for that specific text. We hope you and your students find TypeRacer to be as fun and useful as we have. Happy TypeRacing and best of luck!