Shortcuts are a great way to save time and effort on computers. It always seems that the more you work with a computer, the more shortcuts and tricks you discover that you didn't know before. The mouse presents the opportunity to utilize many of these shortcuts.

For PC users, I will refer to a popular shortcut known as "right clicking" (for MAC users, each time I say "right click", just read it as holding down the mouse button).
Look at your mouse....you should see 2 (some mouses have 3) buttons to click. Everyone uses the left mouse button without even thinking. However, try using the right button to click on various things and see what happens. In almost all cases, the right click will bring up a list of options for you to choose from (where you would normally need to click into a couple things to view these options without right clicking). Try right clicking on anything you want and see what happens....this is the best way to become familiar with this convenient tool.

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Cutting/Copying and Pasting

This is another well known shortcut, but many times it is underutilized. I'm sure almost all of you have cut/copied and pasted within a word processing document. However, do you know that you can copy and past text from a web page to a word processor, e-mail, or any other place that allows you to input text? Try this....

    Go to a web page that has text.....
    Highlight the text by holding down the left (normal) mouse buttom and drag what you want to highlight....
    Now, Either go to the menu at the top of the screen and select EDIT --> COPY, or just use the new right click trick and select 'copy'
    Once you've copied it, you can try pasting it into Microsoft Word, your e-mail, or any other area that you want to type text into. To paste it, just use the old convetion of FILE --> PASTE, or again....use the new right click trick to save time and effort, and select paste. (NOTE: copying text from a web page requires you to format the text in a readable manner once it's been pasted...try it and see.)
    This works across almost all text programs! Try copying and pasting from word processor to an e-mail, or better yet...try copying and pasting text from a word processing document into the text input box of CourseTalk!!!!!!!!

Or, another popular utilization of copying and pasting is copying a web address that is not a hyperlink right off the page and pasting it in the Location box at the top of the page.

LEARNING TO UTILIZE COPYING AND PASTING WILL MAKE YOUR E-CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE SO MUCH EASIER AND LESS TIME CONSUMING!!!!!!!

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Web Browser tips/tricks

multiple browser windows:
You have the ability to have multiple web browser windows open at one time. This means you can have two or more web pages open at the same time. You can switch back and forth between the browswer windows by clicking on the menu of windows at the bottom ot the screen (sorry MAC users...I can't remember off hand how to do it, but play around with it....you'll figure it out :-) ) For both Netscape and Internet Explorer, you can go to FILE --> NEW --> NAVIGATOR WINDOW or you can just press the 'Ctrl' key and the 'N' key at the same time (Ctrl+N) . Try it out...you can have one browser window open with the E-classroom web site, and the other window you can have the Coursetalk site, or WHATEVER YOU WANT!

Page Loading Problems:
Sometimes web pages seem to take forever to load onto your computer screen (or you get a message saying that the server is not responding)... There could be a variety of problems involved with this, but here's the best way to speed things up, or figure out what's wrong.

click on 'Stop' to stop the page from continuing to load
Then, click on the link again, and see if the page loads in faster this time.
If the page you're trying to load has partially loaded, click on 'Stop', and then click on the 'Reload' (Netscape) or 'Refresh' (IE) button at the top of the browser.

If problems still persist, the problem could be that a server is actually down, or there is a problem with the computer you're using. If the server is down, you must simply try again later. If there is a problem with the computer you're using, contact a lab assistant, or customer support if you own your computer.

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Setting up hard drive space on computer lab computers (u:\ drive)

Information on setting up your private disk space on campus can be found: HERE