Before You Pitch a Typing Platform to Your Principal

Your principal will not approve a typing platform because students enjoy it. She approves it when six questions have answers: data, cost, your time, devices, proof of use, and who gets left out. Districts touched 2,982 edtech tools on average in 2024-25, and Meta Typing Club is one more name in that pile.

TL;DR: Do not ask your principal to approve the platform. Ask her to route it to whoever owns edtech vetting, with your six answers attached.

Why good pitches die in eight minutes

You get the tail of a staff meeting, or eight minutes in the hallway.

That count comes from Instructure's LearnPlatform report, which also found districts under pressure to shrink the inventory. Your principal has watched software arrive with a pilot and leave without a mention.

A pitch fails at the first question you cannot answer.

Ask for a route to vetting

The Federal Trade Commission's COPPA FAQ recommends that districts, "rather than delegating that decision to the teacher," decide whether a service's information practices are appropriate. The ask changes shape: who owns vetting here, and may I send them this packet today?

In some districts a packet sent to vetting sits there for a semester. Where the queue is a black hole, say so first and ask for a bounded trial with no student accounts. Ask for a route, not a ruling.

What leadership will actually ask

Six questions cover almost every version of this meeting.

The question	Why it lands there	What you bring
Who sees the student data?	Board-level risk	Fields collected, ad use, deletion
What does it cost at our size?	Renewal is where cost shows up	Written quote at your enrollment
How much of your time?	Staffing cost nobody budgets	Minutes to roster, minutes weekly
Will it run on our devices?	The cart is locked down	Browser needs, anything to install
How will we know it worked?	Audits find unused licenses	One metric, one date
Who gets left out?	Your roster is not one profile	Scripts, layouts, accessibility

Four of them you can answer tonight: your time, your devices, your metric and its date, and who the product may not serve. On cost, ask in writing what a one-year license costs at your enrollment, what it renews at, and what happens to student work if you do not renew. That page and those emails are unpaid prep time.

Where the privacy answer comes from

Hold every vendor to a checklist you did not write, us included. 1EdTech's TrustEd Apps Data Privacy Rubric covers five areas: general notification, data collected, security, third-party data interactions, and advertising. One email does the work: "Please answer in writing how you handle each of the five areas of the 1EdTech data privacy rubric."

Under COPPA a school may consent for parents, but the FTC limits that to data collected for the school's use and benefit "and for no other commercial purpose." The amended COPPA Rule took effect June 23, 2025, and companies had until April 22, 2026 to comply fully, K-12 Dive reported, so an assurance written earlier has aged out.

Silence on those five areas is itself an answer.

Proof of use: week one against week eight

Evidence bars are rising: 45% of the tools in Instructure's LearnPlatform report have published Every Student Succeeds Act research, up from 32% a year earlier. Keyboarding products mostly sit outside that 45%, and pretending otherwise costs you the room.

Baseline your class in week one on speed and accuracy, repeat in week eight, report both. Structured lessons plus a teacher dashboard showing average WPM, accuracy and per-student progress mean you read those numbers off the screen and record them yourself. Across Meta Typing Club's 10,000+ learners, daily practice averages roughly 10 WPM a month. That is our own figure, not independent research, and an average rather than a promise for your class.

The champion who reports a disappointing number is the one trusted with the next ask.

If a child in your room writes in another script

Check your own roster first. A student who writes at home in Persian, Pashto or Dari is learning two keyboards at once, and translated menus over English lessons teach one of them. Ask each vendor whether they teach the key positions of that script, with right-to-left text handled properly. Meta Typing Club builds courses in multiple international languages with right-to-left support. Ask to see one lesson in the child's own script before you call a product a fit.

Key Takeaways

• Ask your principal to route the tool to whoever owns edtech vetting.
• Tool fatigue, not doubt about keyboarding, is the first thing your pitch has to clear.
• Six questions decide the meeting: four you answer tonight, two you get from vendors in writing.
• Full compliance with the amended COPPA Rule was required by April 22, 2026, so earlier assurances are stale.
• Get the 1EdTech rubric's five areas answered in writing, and promise week one against week eight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who do I actually send this to?

Ask her who runs edtech vetting: often a director of digital learning or an assistant superintendent for curriculum. Send that person your one page and the vendor's written privacy answers, and copy your principal.

What do I tell her this costs?

Do not name a number you found online. Ask for a written quote at your enrollment, with renewal and exit terms named.

How many evenings does setup cost me?

Budget one evening for the answer sheet. On Meta Typing Club, rostering is a class join code and a student list, done once; ask any other vendor whether it needs a roster-sync ticket from your district first. After that the recurring cost is two data pulls, week one and week eight, around twenty minutes each.

What counts as evidence for a typing program?

ESSA-tiered research is the strongest form, and few keyboarding products carry it. Say that before someone else does, then offer what you can produce: your class's week-one and week-eight numbers, plus vendor usage logs showing who logged in.

We already bought a typing tool nobody used.

Agree with her, then ask what share of teachers ever logged in and what stopped the ones who did. If rostering broke in September, that is a procurement lesson rather than a verdict on typing.

What to do before Friday

Write the six answers on one page tonight and mark the two you cannot fill in yourself. Send those to every vendor on your list and treat a vague reply as data. Then ask your principal the routing question and put a date on the usage report. The leadership half of this argument sits in our piece on the keyboarding gap in district AI-readiness plans. If we are on your list, ask us through our contact page for a written quote at your enrollment.