Time Saving Tips in MS Word

I went to a couple of tech-related sessions at CATESOL, both of which are useful to various extent. The first one is using Goolge's "Documents" feature to facilitate students' writing peer review. I can see two advantages of this program: (1). Because the teacher is the moderator and pairs students up (secretly), the writer and the reviewer are both anonymous so the students do not have to worry about criticizing their fellow classmates and hurting their feelings. (2) It can be done (and should be done) outside the class. Because of the time limit, we did not have enough time to practice and ask enough questions. From what I learned there, it seems the teacher has to spend quite some time facilitating this and the application is somewhat limited. Therefore, I need to do some research before I can decide whether this is something I will use in my writing class. If you are interested in pursuing this further, I have the handouts to get you started.

The other one I went to is very simple yet practical. It was called "Time-Saving Tips in MS Word," hosted by two educational technologists from San Diego Community College District. They send "Tech Tip of the Day" to their teachers and their tips are easy and very useful. I think, when we have our own educational technologist, we can do something similar!
Here are some of the tips I found useful for ME (all those tech savvy people probably already know these).

1. Line Spacing: Ctrl+a (to hightlight all the text), then ctrl+1 (for single spacing), ctrl+2 (for double spacing), ctrl+5 (for 1.5 line spacing).

2. to highlight a word: double click anywhere in the word
to highlight a sentence: ctrl+ click anywhere in the sentence
to highlight a paragraph: triple click anywhere in the paragraph

3. Make text bigger/smaller on website: ctrl and + (make text bigger)
ctrl and - (make text smaller).

Again, if you need more tips, please ask me for the handout.

p.s. One of the presenters mentioned that eventually all the handouts for all the sessions will be available on CATESOL's website.

Julie