Super Shortcuts for Chromebooks

This Tech Tip is about using shortcuts to be more effective.  I'm not talking about cutting corners or taking the easy way out.  This is a blog about technology after all.  I'm talking about keyboard shortcuts.  And since this blog is geared toward technology in education, I'll be explaining keyboard shortcuts for Chromebooks, which are being increasingly used by teachers and students every year.

Allow me to digress for a moment to offer some interesting statistics about Chromebook usage in American classrooms.  According to a 2016 survey conducted by Front Row Education of over 2,500 teachers and administrators in the United States, over 60% of classrooms have access to Chromebooks, which is up 15% from the previous year.  Even 54% of Kindergarten through Grade 2 classrooms use Chromebooks.  Finally, 67% of teachers on the West Coast have access to Chromebooks while 62% of East Coast teachers have access to them.

Using keyboard shortcuts is an easy way to be more productive and efficient.  I created a PDF with the top ten keyboard shortcuts for Chromebooks, which you can download below.  Or you can use the Save to Google Drive Chrome Extension I wrote about earlier to save it directly to your Drive.

In the PDF, you'll find the classics of copy, cut, and paste.  You'll also find some other interesting shortcuts you may not have known.  To search for a word, phrase, or any other text, press Ctrl and f to open the find bar in the upper right.  From there, you can quickly find what you're looking for, which is very helpful when researching something.  If something you find on the Internet is too small or too large to comfortably see, press Ctrl + or Ctrl - to zoom in and out.  The percentage of the zoom will appear in the upper right when you do so.

You can quickly open a new tab without having to use the mouse by pressing Ctrl and t.  If you accidentally close a tab you still want, press Ctrl, Shift, and t to reopen the last closed tab.  Taking screenshots has many great uses from creating instructions to presentations.  To take a whole screenshot, press Ctrl and the screenshot key.  To take a screenshot of only a particular area of the screen, press Ctrl, Shift, and the screenshot key.  The screenshot key looks like this:

Here is the PDF with the top ten keyboard shortcuts for Chromebooks.  With these, you and your students will be productivity pros in no time!