Monitoring Student Files

Evaluating student work is easy with Teacher’s Area Reports features in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for Schools. This section guides you through the evaluation process and presents a variety of assessment suggestions that help your students get the most of the program’s typing curriculum.

To ensure that each of your students fully benefits from the many features of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for Schools, you must help each of them sign in for the first time. Stress the importance of accessing and using only their student profiles.

If your students are young, it may be best to initially sign-in each new user and access their profiles yourself.

Teaching Tips

If you have more than one computer in use, identify each typing station and assign students to one particular machine where their records are stored. (If you’re using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for Schools (Network), this is not necessary.)

Keep a list of station assignments so that you know which computer to use to review or adjust a particular student’s file, and for future grading.

Allow time for students to establish a record within the program before you begin monitoring their progress.

Once students have completed a few pre-scripted lessons and the program has an adequate sampling of their typing, it begins to tailor the sessions to fit each student’s proficiency.

It may be necessary to delete class and student profiles from time to time, for example, when students leave mid-semester, or at the beginning of a new term. For information on removing student files, see the Deleting Classes and Deleting Students sections of the User Manual.

Profile Monitoring Checklist

When determining what to look for and how to remedy it, you should review the following list:

• Have a student call up their personal profiles only.
• Do not let students register under someone else’s name. Watch them as they log on and check that they use their profiles. If they do not, tell them that the program is only effective when they do the work themselves and move at their own pace.
• Check that students complete their lessons and watch for signs of inactivity at the computer. If this becomes a problem, try modifying some of their settings (see the Editing Classes and Editing Students sections of the User Manual). For example, you might increase the game frequency by creating more custom lessons that are in a game environment and instructing your students to select those lessons during their practice sessions.
• Monitor students to ascertain whether they are typing in a variety of exercise formats. Be sure that they do not change most of their lessons to games.
• Check that students do not skip each presented lesson until they reach a game.