PLD Articles

4 tips for your teacher laptop – Apple edition

By Steve Voisey

1. Command tab

The point of this tip is to switch between applications. For instance, you have chrome open and you want to quickly switch to Word. Of course, this is only useful if you have more than one application open. My experience is that some teachers only ever use Chrome, so this tip is no use for them.

What to do:

• Hold your left thumb on the command button (next to the space bar)
• Touch the tab key once with your pinky

You’ll see all your open applications. If you touch tab again, you’ll go to the next application. If you let go of alt, you will switch to that application.

2. Command ctrl shift 4

This is my most popular tip. It enables you to take a screenshot and paste it into a document very quickly. For instance, you might see something in a web-page and you want to email someone about it without making them search through the website.

• Find something on the internet that you want to share. It might be some text or even a freezeframe from a video.
• Put your left thumb on the command key, your pinky on the ctrl key, and your ring finger on shift
• Touch 4 with your index finger. The screen will go a bit dark.
• Release all the keys
• Use the mouse to draw a rectangle around the part of the website you want to share
• Paste the screen shot into an email or a document

That’s it!

3. Two fingered scrolling

Do you get frustrated trying to find the scroll bar? This tip works 99% of the time.

• Open a long webpage (like tts.co.nz) that needs some scrolling to read
• Touch two fingers on the touchpad very gently and move them up and down.

You’re almost certainly scrolling. And you’re welcome!

4. Use a mail client like Spark

This is a bit controversial. Here goes: I HARDLY EVER READ EMAIL IN A BROWSER. Phew!
The app I use depends on the mail system. Most NZ schools have Outlook OR Google Mail. If your schools mail is in Outlook, I’d use the Outlook app. It’s very powerful and does almost everything I need. Here are my essentials:

• command n to write a new message
• Tab between fields
• Command Enter to send
• Command F and R to forward or reply

But more schools use Google Mail. I’ve been using Spark Mail recently. It works. It looks beautiful, and it does everything in my essentials list. And it’s free.