http://www.appymall.com/apps/ghost-type-a-typing-tutor-to-master-your-ipad-typing-skills
Reviewed by Jo Booth, OT on 2013-10-23
Ghost Type - a typing tutor to master your iPad typing skills Absolutely excellent keyboarding app for school age kids. As a clinician, I appreciate that you can register multiple users, keep data, and customize this app for a particular child's needs. There is a great deal of support by this developer in making the use of this app be as successful as possible for the user. The ghost feature is a faded prompt as you succeed. There are also features to help you work with social media and compose posts. I would highly recommend not only this app, but checking out this developers other apps.
Traditional typing tutors might be a great thing for traditional keyboards, but for the iPad you need something completely different. iPad keyboards do not have physical “home keys,” the tactile and audible feedback of keys being pressed, and are smaller than most physical keyboards, making it awkward for large hands to do two-handed touch-typing. Ghost Type by Demografix is designed to help people of all ages to type on the iPad with two hands, and you’ll also find it might help single-handed typists also, such as those with a physical impairment. I often find myself typing with a single hand (either left or right) due to the other being occupied by small people, and I’ve found Ghost Type has helped me with speed and accuracy.
Features
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1Ghost Keyboard – The characters on the keyboard fade to encourage finding keys by memory and not the hunt-and-peck method. You can set the speed at which the letters fade, or you can turn the Ghost keyboard off, using the App’s settings, accessed from the main screen.
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2Individual profiles – You can set any number of individual profiles and then be able to view each user’s progress. This is particularly valuable in school classrooms, and you’ll also find it useful in any situation where more than one person uses the iPad.
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3Fonts – Ghost Type uses Beginner Handwriting fonts for all Australian States and Territories, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA. This is in addition to five standard fonts. You can select the desired font using the options in Settings.
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4Sound – A “blip” noise sounds when you make a mistake. Personally, I find this helpful, but if it annoys you, you can turn it off.
Activities
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1Lessons – Over thirty editable lessons are installed with the app. These include beginner levels covering different areas of the keyboard, and lessons to practice speed and accuracy, such as sight word lists, national anthems and other subject-specific lists. The lessons available are a great start, but the really serve as an example of what you can do with your own custom activities. You can quickly and easily create lessons with any content you wish. The very first lesson, Practice, shows correct finger positioning with a map of the keys. Each key in the image reacts when you type the corresponding key on the Ghost Type keyboard.
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2Speed Test – 14 test activities are available, with text selected to include all keys. You can also create your own tests.
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3Ghost Type - use this area to practice your typing skills. Text can be sent to Twitter or Facebook, or can be sent as an email. Social Networking is inappropriate for younger children, but it might be motivating for older children and adults already using Twitter and Facebook. Parents and teachers can restrict access to social networking sites or email by using the iPad’s Settings to restrict access to the Internet.
Points of interest
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1Special needs – Ghost Type would be a good resource for those learning to navigate the keyboard single-handed, such as people with a physical impairment. It would be best to consult with an Occupational Therapist, but once you have sorted out correct positioning of hand and iPad, it would be a simple matter to create some typing lessons to practice each finger’s position. See the Related Links section below for some more information on one-handed typing techniques.
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2Audio feedback – Due to the lack of tactile feedback, some users may find it helpful to turn on the key clicks sound using the Settings App.
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3Custom Activities – The lessons and speed tests that come with the Ghost Type stand on their own for quality, but the stand-out feature of this app is the ability to create your own custom lessons and tests to meet the needs of the individuals using the app. Creating practice activities is as simple as cutting and pasting text. You can create custom lessons and speed tests with text related to class or homework contents. If learning to use the keyboard with one hand, it would be relatively easy to make up some one-handed typing lessons.
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4Importing and Exporting activities – Not only can you create lessons and speed tests, but you can share them with others by email, or via the Demografix website. I would encourage people to submit their lessons to Demografix for inclusion on their site. The more lessons we share, the better for everyone. Perhaps I’ll come up with some one-handed typing lessons to share.
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5External Keyboard – if you use an external keyboard, you can still use Ghost Type to practice your typing when it is attached.
Verdict
Demografix has once again delivered an excellent teaching resource that will be of interest to anyone of any age learning to type on an iPad. Even competent touch-typists such as myself will find it useful in transferring their traditional keyboarding skills to this new technology. The customisable nature of the app means that parents, teachers and therapists will be able to fine-tune it to the needs of their children, students or clients. Users of School Writing, School Fonts or Literacy (soon to be reviewed on this blog) will find it very similar in terms of settings and creating custom activities. This is definitely one schools will want to get, and I can imagine a few therapists wanting it in their “iPad toolkits.”
March 20, 2012
What funeducationalapps thought.. link to review
Ghost Type - a typing tutor to master your iPad typing skills by demografix is a learning app for your kids or students to master and learn how to type using interactive iPad keyboard. It offers standard lessons as well as features to create your own lessons. Ideal for teachers, within a home-school program or simply for parents to help and support their kids master the iPad keyboard.
Ghost Type: Comprehensive Typing Learning Program for iPad
It is a fact, with the development of tablets such as the iPad and its use for educational purposes our kids need to learn and master typing skills on interactive keyboard and today's review Ghost Type - a typing tutor to master your iPad typing skills will help your kids and students learn and get the grip to become typing masters!
With Ghost Type you will find complete sets of lessons to learn step by step from beginner to advanced. The app act as a tutor and monitor students’ progress. As a teacher you will be able to create your own lessons. Each lesson can be exported and shared via Email, Dropbox and iTunes.
Ghost Type offers various settings and can be used in Australia, UK, NZ and USA as it offers multiple keyboards with fonts specially used in these countries.
With Ghost Type you can have multiple users working on different lessons, create speed test for your students and you can even have them compose a message to send straight to your mail box.
What Fun Educational Apps Liked!
It is the first time we came across an app specifically designed to learn how to type on the iPad. It offers many possibilities and will help student improve both typing speed and accuracy on an iPad. The keyboard is specially designed to help user memorize the position of each letter. When you start typing, letters on the keyboard fade. Letters display come back if you type a wrong letter or pause. The great part is that the fade-in speed can be set as very slow, slow, normal, fast and very fast, simply adjust via the settings to best suit you students need.
To help master typing skills, each time you type letter it highlights in green if correct and in red if incorrect. A great feature that allows you to quickly know if you are typing correctly.
To monitor speed, the app also displays the time elapsed, your average words per minute (wpm), and your accuracy percentage.
It has been designed to be used by teachers and allows you to enter several users.
It offers set practice lessons starting from beginner to advance. Each lesson is easy to follow. Progress and accuracy is recorded so you can monitor each student. If you prefer, you can also create your own lessons with your own content to suit your child or students.
Although the app contains external links, all can be disabled via the setting menu so you can be sure students stay within the app and practice!
Overall, Ghost Type is a great app to help and support student master their typing skills. It offers lots of features to suit all needs. Easy to use it helps your students improve their typing skills … and we think it should be used by anyone wishing to improve their typing skills ... It acts as great tutor!
July 25, 2012
What AppAble thought.. link to review
This app has a ton of content and is totally customizable.
The addition of school writing fonts is a huge plus in my book and fonts for Australia, NZ, UK and the USA are included.
The *ghost* keyboard is fantastic...Once you start typing the letters fade out and fade back in when you either type the wrong letter or if you pause in your typing.(This feature can be turned on or off in the settings as well as increasing/decreasing fading speeds) Great for teaching memory typing . Perfect for use in the classroom. Ghost Type has built in lessons, including Dolch words, and the easy ability to add your own lessons.
You can create multiple user profiles and all access and functions are lockable.
I have been looking for an app to help my son become more confident with his iPad typing and Ghost Type seems to be just what I was looking for. I really cannot think of a feature they have not already thought of. They even have a fun Ghost Write function...enter your Facebook/Twitter details and you can use the Ghost Type keyboard to practice your typing while you update your status'!
Ghost Type is a high quality app that is well worth the price tag...Highly recommended!
July 25, 2012
Reviewed by Grace - Link to imums.com
Ghost Type by
demografix pty ltd is an app for students and adults to master typing on the iPad using the innovative Ghosting keyboard. It supports multiple student profiles and has inbuilt lessons and practice text that are fully customizable as well as other features like lockable settings, choice of 14 fonts (including school fonts) and the ability to create/save/share your own content.
The Ghosting keyboard has no letters shown on it so that students can learn to type without looking at the keyboard. At first, the keyboard displays the letters but they begin to fade when you start typing. It remains faded out until you type a wrong letter or stop typing, and the letters will fade back in to assist you. The fade-in speed can be set as very slow, slow, normal, fast and very fast via the settings. The Ghost Type keyboard is optional, you can turn it off via the settings or use a ‘partial’ setting. The app is also fully compatible with external and bluetooth keyboards. Regardless of which keyboard you use, the on-screen text will show you where your typing mistakes are as well as your typing speed and accuracy as you type.
Designed for use with a class of students, this app allows the teacher to create, save and share or import new content into the app for the whole class to use instead of having to buy additional lesson and practice text packs. Though the app contains some lessons and practice text for students with different levels of typing skills, you will need to add more lessons depending on your students’ current abilities. For example, more lessons for learning the finger positions of the letters and typing of special characters. Students can choose which lessons they want to practice typing and you can monitor the progress from their individual profiles.
Ghost Type is also a great tool for getting students to learn a teacher-created content while typing the content. This not only makes the learning process more interesting, it also helps the students develop faster and more accurate typing skills at the same time. And best of all, you can be sure that your students have read every word in the lesson! Get them to type it a few more times and they would have memorized the information! For some fun applications, you can allow (via the app Settings) your students access to the Ghost Write section where they can practice typing their Facebook updates, tweets and emails using the ghosting keyboard and send them from the app itself. You can also set up a competition among your students by showing them their ranking in terms of their average typing speed and accuracy on the profiles page.
Being able to type fast and accurately is a skill worth investing the time and effort to master. It is a useful skill that will give your students/children an advantage in a world where most (if not all) writing are done on a QWERTY keyboard. It helps save time and improves spelling but most importantly, it allows them to concentrate on the content that they are typing instead of being bogged down with finding the correct keys all the time.
Overall, Ghost Type is an effective, functional and fun typing app for all students (and adults) and all classrooms should have access to this amazing app.
Version History
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•3.1
Sep 17, 2020
Updated the app to fix an import issue and made some code enhancements.
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•3.0
Sep 7, 2020
We made some improvements to the app to cater for the new operating systems and different sizes of the new iPads.
We also did a general service changing the oil and spark plugs.
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•2.2
Mar 12, 2015
This app has been updated by Apple to use the latest Apple signing certificate.
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•Fix for a bug or three.
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•2.1
Feb 13, 2015
* Additional keyboard layouts in settings for various European languages
* Accents / alternate characters on holding down keys
* Minor bug fixes
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•2.0
Nov 5, 2014
Thanks for using our app!
• We added new alternate keyboard layouts as requested by our users - QWERTZ, AZERTY and Dvorak (selectable via app settings)
• We added Airdrop support for iOS 7 and above for iPad (4th generation or later), iPad Mini and to share with people using a Mac with Yosemite. Checkout youtube.com/demografixapps for a demo on using Airdrop. Thanks Apple, we love it!
• We updated the style of the Ghost Type keyboard to better reflect the system keyboard.
• Squashed a bug and added a few enhancements.
Please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes, they help us... :-)
You can also email updates@demografix.com.au comments and feedback.
Keep up to date with us on facebook.com/demografix.pty.ltd
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•1.6
Feb 12, 2014
We have added a new function as speech synthesis as requested by out fans (requires iOS7):
Settings: announce letter names, skip announcing letters if behind and speech pitch.
We also updated the app for iOS7.
After you have downloaded the new version, please consider taking a moment to leave a rating or review. All feedback is appreciated.
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•1.5
Nov 27, 2013
A fix for trailing returns (page breaks) and untypable characters- smart quotes are replaced with regular quotes, long dashes with regular ones and other untypable characters are replaced with spaces.
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•1.4
Nov 6, 2013
Added setting (default on) to show an on-screen keyboard as a fingering reference when a Bluetooth keyboard is paired.
Presentation improvements for practice lesson.
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•1.3
Oct 28, 2013
A client asked and we delivered this update that allows you to resize the text for younger learners.
We also squashed a bug...
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•1.2
Aug 6, 2013
In this update we added the option to color keys to indicate correct fingering as our most requested feature to add. You asked, we delivered.
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•We also made some minor bug fixes and improvements as suggested by our users.
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•1.1
Jun 8, 2012
• Added the ability to share lessons and tests via Bluetooth
• Minor bug fixes
- ❤ Read rave reviews at http://tinyurl.com/ghosttype
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•1.0
Mar 9, 2012
