Inspired by the sweltering heat of the past few days of school, I thought I’d share a few shortcut keystrokes. You may (and should) be familiar with some, but others may not be as familiar. Here are a few hotkey combinations that every cool teacher should know:

ctrl + F

F is for FIND. Everyone probably knows this one. But many forget it. And if you’re not using this hotkey combination, you should start soon—because you’re unnecessarily exhausting your eyes scanning web pages, books, PDFs, and everything else on your screen. You know what you’re looking for. ctrl+F and type it! And if your students don’t know it, you should enlighten them too.

Windows logo key + ←

On your teacher desktop or Windows laptop, use the Windows key and the left arrow to minimize the active window to the left half of the screen. Then, select another window (or pull the tab out of the browser) and hit Windows logo key + → and minimize another window to the right. Voila! Split screen! Use this for things like recording grades from Google Classroom to MIStar and avoid printing a sheet of paper that is destined for immediate recycling.

ctrl + shift + T

Open the most recently closed tab on your Chrome Browser. This is helpful when you accidentally close the tab you were just looking at, or if you see a student quickly clicking to close tabs as you walk by him and his Chromebook. ctrl + shift + T to reveal what he was trying to hide.

ctrl + A

Select all. This selects the entire page worth of text and gets it ready to do things like copy and paste.

Windows logo key + L

Locks your computer. Need to walk away from your computer while you’re doing something like analyzing grades? Windows key + L locks your computer until you can come back and enter your password.

ctrl + alt + ↑

You’ll probably only need this one if someone annoyingly decides to flip the screen upside down. ctrl + alt + up arrow will turn it back right-side up. I’ll let you guess what key combination they used to flip it upside down or sideways…

These are just a few of the useful hotkey combinations. We’ll explore some more in an upcoming post.