EDU Typing & word processing Program

[Bill Tihen <bill@tasis.ch>]

I have been thinking about the typing program.  A good one would have to
have the following features.

1) Teaches typing in a straight forward step by step manner.
2) Tracks and reports the usage and progress to the teacher and to the
student (via email?).  If it would report the following it would be a far
better system than having students print out their work at the end of class
and handing it to me to evaluate.
	a) usage time
	b) number of keystrokes
	c) average words per minute
	d) new keys learned.
	e) average accuracy
	f) accuracy with new keys
	g) accuracy with other learned keys
	h) current session statistics compared with an average session
	i) average session compared to general population at this level.
3) The database should be accessible to the student and teacher outside of
at the end of a session (not really necessary, but nice).  But should not
be alterable by the student.  
4) There should be test and quiz modules built into the program too.
Restricted access to the text texts would be good.  Timed tests (1 minute,
3 minutes and 5 minutes would be good).  Also helpful, but not necessary
would be to test how long it takes to type a document.  These results would
also be sent to the teacher and student.  


5) For icing on the cake it could also have a unit on formatting reports,
business letters.  Although, this would require a simple word processor and
somehow evaluate if they understand when to use centering, tabs, etc and
how to control the margins, for example with biblographies.  (This is
probably asking way too much, but perhaps a seperate program then).  It
would be nice just to have a tool that taught basic word processing --
maybe even tables using tabs.  Of course it should also have a save as so
and teach them how to save as rtf files so that other people can use their
files.

Perhaps even a basic os tutor.  Switching between windows, saving, starting
applications, using the mouse.  Some basic commands.  

Infact, if anyone is interested I have a complete list of what I consider
os & wp basics.  I would love to have a demo program to show everyone how
to do this and then assign random tasks and test them on their ability to
do it.  It can be hard and time consuming to do this with 30 kids in a
classroom.

Anyway, just some ideas on how to make linux the most loved edu os.