Reilly's Technology Toolbox

This post is about a skill that is valuable for everyone to know:  COMMAND F (NOTE: the keyboard shortcut is “CTRL F” for PC users, but I’ll refer to COMMAND F, since that’s the Mac keyboard shortcut and I have to pick one.)
You perform this shortcut by:Mac Users: Holding down the COMMAND key on your keyboard and then  pressing the F key.  A pop-up window will appear in the upper right hand corner.  You type in your keyword there.  Details are below.  PC Users: Holding down the CTRL key on your keyboard and pressing the F key.  A pop-up window will appear in the upper right hand corner.  You type in your keyword there.         Never heard of it?  Don’t fret, you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know what it does!  COMMAND F is the keyboard shortcut for FIND. In this age of overwhelming data, we not only need skills to find the correct information in a search engine, but we also need to find information on a page.    This little gem has a plethora of applications for the classroom, too.  Here are a few:Researching   Some students begin researching by entering a keyword like “Honey Badger” into a Google search engine.  They find a website and either print an inexplicably large number of pages that they begin to wade through or stare aimlessly at the computer trying to find what they are looking for.  This is long, tedious, boring and often times finds students collecting  irrelevant information.  If instead, students have three keywords they begin with like “honey badger, species, habitat” they will have many more hits that are relevant to their topic.  Once they click on a website, by using the COMMAND F shortcut and typing in “habitat”, they will be taken directly to that spot in the cite.COMMAND F (CTRL F on PCs) is the perfect tool to use when you are reading for specific content online.  Say someone sends you a PDF about Assessments that is 108 pages long.  They want you to read it and generate an outline about Formative Assessments for a meeting TOMORROW. There’s no table of contents and of course, it’s 4:30.   Gulp.  You don’t have to read the entire document or make yourself nauseous by skimming page after page trying to find the info you need.  Using COMMAND F will take you to the first instance the words appear and as long as your cursor is inside the FIND box, you can hit the return key to take you to the next instance the word appears in the text.  (In the graphic here, you see what CTRL F looks like in Google Docs.  It highlights the words in green and gives me the total number of times the word command is used in my document.)    As you click through, it will take you to all the other places in the text where those words appear.  

Editing Essays
Teaching students to edit their papers can sometimes be quite a feat.  In a world where they’re told that every stick figure they draw should be in the Louvre, it’s sometimes hard to explain to them that there is such a thing as a rough draft and that their masterpiece isn’t finished after the first go around.  Teaching students the COMMAND F trick could make things a bit easier on everyone.  Here’s how that works - upon completing their rough drafts students should search:

• AAAWWWUBBIS...if you’re an English teacher, you know what that means.  Any word that could possibly begin a dependent clause can be searched separately, allowing students to check to see that there are no fragments in their papers.

• Dead Words:  If your class has a dead word list, ask students to search for them and remove them from their papers.

• Commas(Punctuation of any kind): Commas errors always seem to top the list.  Ask students to search for commas to decide if they have been used correctly. 

• Search for then and make sure that it refers to time passing. If it’s a comparison, it should be than.

• Some words often feel vague to readers; search for each of them and consider replacing them with more concrete words. These include good, great, interesting, wonderful, and truly.

• Search for its and it’s and make sure you’re using them correctly. (Not sure which is which? Google it.)

• Search for the word that and make sure that it’s not renaming a person; if it is, you can usually safely change it to who. 

• You – type in the search box the word you. If any come up and are not in a quote, figure out how to get rid of it. You might want to change it to people or one and make sure the rest of the sentence still makes sense.

• There, their – Search there. Every time you see it check to see if it is possessing the word after it. If it is, then you need to change it to their. Example: They drove their car to the store. Their tells me whose car it is. Then search their, and make sure that every their is possessing the word after it. Remember there has here in it, and their has heir in it. An heir is someone who will inherit or come to possess property of someone who dies.

• Think about words your students misspell often.  Make your own list of the top mistakes and ask students to run them through Control-F as the final step before submitting the final draft.

So, as you're planning your lessons and kids are researching online or editing their papers, COMMAND F (for Macs) or CTRL F (for PCs) can be a great skill to teach them.