A Review of Bytes of Learning

Jenny/ February 20, 2018/ Homeschool Reviews

   

 

I am excited to be doing a review of Bytes of Learning  and their UltraKey Online Family Subscription which is an online keyboarding course for children and adults.  My oldest son is 7 and has been after me to teach him to type.  I wasn’t sure exactly how I would accomplish this well since I only had 1 year of keyboarding in school and that was 20 years ago!  Enter Bytes of Learning!

 

First off, I was impressed with their setup.  It was all upfront on the screen & quite easy to navigate.  It did take a bit of getting used to at first to know which area to go to for each things but with a little practice we quickly got the hang of it.

 

One super awesome thing for younger kids who aren’t reading well independently is that it will read all the instructions out loud for them!  Huge benefit to a busy mom!  The instructions were quite plain and each part came with short instructional videos to explain in detail (4 min. each on average).

 You could stop wherever you needed to in the lesson and pick up back there each day.  Though I believe we did finish each page or it made you redo the whole page.

 

It first addressed good posture and gives you a quiz on a person typing and lets you correct her posture.  Then it reminds you of your posture before each lesson.  It also has a skill check after each completed lesson and shows you where you need improvement.  And then there are games for fun practice!  I couldn’t resist playing a few also!

 

A parent or child can set goals or have automatic goals set for them.  You can adjust those anytime you need to.  The only thing that did cause us some issues was our internet functionality.  Because it is completely online and not downloadable when our internet was spotty some of the features didn’t work properly.  But that wasn’t the programs fault, just a note for those who have frequent internet issues.

 

Overall, I am very pleased with it.  I have been using it some in addition to my son and it has helped me to improve also.  It is becoming a blessing in our homeschool and I fully expect by the time my son uses it for the year that he will become a rather good typist (not a small feat for a 7 year old!).  So, I think they did a great job with a program that can work for 1st graders & adults 🙂

 

I would also note this can be really helpful for younger children to get practice with recognizing the alphabet in words!  Be sure and go click on the link below to read more reviews about this product that I’m sure I will be using for all my kids in the years to come!

 

 Here’s an example out of the first lessons my son took.  As you can see from the left stars he did perfect!