Virtual keyboard

From Qedoc

Screenshot of a user-defined virtual keyboard suitable for typing French

A virtual keyboard is an interactive on-screen simulation of a keyboard. A keyboard may not necessarily have as many keys as a physical keyboard. It may be limited to numbers, letters, icons, or a user-defined set of symbols. Instead of typing onto the computer keyboard, the learner can click on an image of a keyboard to insert letters and symbols. Many question types on the Qedoc Quiz Player support "virtual keyboards".

Virtual keyboards are useful for:

• Younger children (and anyone else) with reduced typing skills.
• Foreign language learning, where the physical keyboard is not suited to the language being typed.
• Many European languages use the Roman script as a base, but have special characters, such as accented characters. If your physical keyboard is English, you would have difficulty finding and creating suitable characters efficiently. A virtual keyboard can be adapted to suit.
• Other languages around the world may use entirely different script systems (e.g. Arabic, Greek, Japanese). Again, the virtual keyboard can be adapted to suit, regardless of the physical keyboard on the computer.
• Scientific responses, where special symbols may be required.
• Simplified keyboards. For example, in a test on Japanese numbers, a keyboard could be defined which only contains Japanese numerical symbols.