I read an article, "Why Don't We Teach Kids How to Use CTRL+F?" a couple of days ago and it reminded me of two things:
- We make a lot of assumptions about what people know about using computers.
- No matter how much we know, there are always some basic fundamentals that we don't know. Technology has too many facets for anyone to know everything.
For instance, did you know that CTRL+F is a key combination that works for searching a web page or document in every standard web browser and in Office and PDF documents? It's a shortcut that's been around for a long time. I think I learned about it a couple of years ago and still don't use it consistently. How much of my time has been wasted by scrolling when CTRL+F could have taken me to the info I need so much faster?
If you didn't know about CTRL+F, don't feel bad. According to the article, 90% of folks don't know about it. But now you know, so use it, and pass it on to others!
Why do 90% of us, teachers and students included, not know about such a fundamental computer skill? I encourage you to read the article, as it is relatively short and talks about more than just using CTRL+F, including a few observations about why basic computer literacy might be low on the priority list in education.
After you read it, come back here and share your favorite "computer basic everyone should know" and/or your thoughts on the conclusions drawn in the article.
Blog photo courtesy of Flikr user secretlondon123 with permission under a Creative Commons license agreement.
