As a teacher, you may need to solve things on the spot.
If you ever spent time at a school, you know this universal truth. Many traditional computer labs are quietly broken. The computers themselves may be fine. But if you teach IT, media literacy or vocational skills as I do, you encounter IT bureaucracy. A lot of the things you want to teach your students get artificially blocked.
It can be a firewall that randomly blocks a news article you wanted to use for your lessons. Other times you need to use some legacy program, which is bloated, buggy or crashes all the time. Today, I experienced the latter.
During an assessment of my students’ workplace skills, the typing app we use was glitching. On some PC’s it was non-functional. All we wanted to do was let the students do a simple typing test. Just to assess their typing skills on a computer. The standard institutional path would have been to file an IT ticket. But getting it solved through that route can take weeks. Alternatively, we could adapt to an ad-ridden commercial alternative behind a paywall.
Instead, I decided to build a solution myself. I “vibecoded” a clean, lightweight typing test application designed specifically for our assessment needs—and hosted it open-access right here on the blog at abenesch.info/typing-test/.
Every student could access it instantly on any device, free of distraction, without needing to involve the IT department or navigate institutional bureaucracy.
You can argue that a typing test might seem like a small, everyday tool. But making it highlights a much larger shift modern education requires. Moving away from fragile institutional reliance toward creating solutions and practising self-advocacy.
1. Reclaiming Practical Agency
In my essay The Hidden Skill Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About, I examine how modern education systems often teach students passive compliance rather than direct operational habits. We expect young adults to enter the workforce ready to navigate complex environments, yet our educational structures frequently render both teachers and students powerless in the face of minor technical or administrative friction.
Building a custom tool for my classroom was an act of direct self-advocacy and modelling. It demonstrated to my students that when the tools provided by an institution fail, we do not have to throw up our hands or wait for permission. We can analyse the problem, leverage modern technology, and build a functional alternative ourselves. And, with modern AI tools, this is easier than ever before in the history of mankind.
2. Bypassing Gatekeepers via Open Platforms (Open Future)
When educational technology is locked behind proprietary software, expensive licenses, or rigid corporate infrastructure, it limits who can learn and how. By creating an ad-free, open-access web application and hosting it on an independent platform, anyone—whether a student in my lab or a learner halfway across the world—can evaluate their typing speed and accuracy without barriers.
An Open Future in pedagogy relies on tools that are transparent, lightweight, and accessible to everyone regardless of institutional backing.
3. Open-Access Tools for Shared Needs (Collective Solutions)
Educational challenges are rarely unique to a single classroom. If my students needed a reliable, distraction-free assessment tool to measure workplace readiness, chances are other educators and learners face the exact same technical roadblocks.
Rather than keeping the app tucked away on a local machine, publishing it openly aligns with the core philosophy explored throughout my writing. In another essay, “Only Collective Solutions Can Bring Us Forward“, I explore this thought a bit more in depth. When we share practical, working tools, we create shared value across learning communities.
Try the Tool
The app is live and freely available for anyone to use in their own classroom, training module, or personal practice. I hope you enjoy it, as much as I enjoyed the process of creating it.
Try the Typing Test App (abenesch.info/typing-test/)
Practical projects like this are a part of a broader ongoing inquiry into how we rebuild 21st-century learning environments around agency, real-world competence, and humanistic values.
If you are interested in the broader pedagogical framework behind these ideas, you can explore a compiled volume of core essays in my free eBook edition:
Read: Rethinking Education for an Era of Crisis
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