Tips and Tricks for your Chromebook

Use the following tips and tricks for your Chromebook to make distance learning more manageable!

There are many ways to make school online easier and more efficient, too.  Use the following pieces of advice to make your time distance learning so much easier. 

Grammarly

Let’s say your teacher assigns you a few writing assignments, but you are constantly making writing errors because you want to finish the assignment already!  Or those errors creep up because you type fast and can’t keep up with your writing mistakes.  If you are not using Grammarly, start now!

Grammarly is an app installed on your Chromebook, designed to make online writing clear and effective.  If you use Grammarly, writing will be so much easier to do and will make your writing sound much more professional.  It will catch errors in many different apps, such as email, aside from the entire Google Suite.  Grammarly should be used even if we weren’t distance learning!

Shortcut Trick

Screenshot of the Add-shortcut option
Use the Add Shortcut menu to customize the Google Homepage.

When you open Google Chrome, you see the Google Homepage.  Below the search engine, there is a “+” sign that is an add shortcut option.  When you click it, it asks to type in a name for the shortuct (it can be whatever, preferably the name of the website you want a shortcut for) then, it will prompt you for a URL.  To add the URL, simply go to the website you want to make a shortcut for, and copy the link and paste it.  Now, you have started to make the Google Homepage your own personal dashboard!

 

Too Many Tabs

Since we are currently distance learning, you will have many different tabs open: email, Canvas, Google Classroom, your Google Drive, Kahoot, and who knows what else!  There are always days where wifi is slow and you might not even be able to keep up as your Chromebook gets increasingly slow.  If this happens, limit the tabs you have open.  Try to keep only 1 or 2 open, especially during a Zoom session.  If that doesn’t work, consider getting our school’s hotspot to help with your internet speed.

Keeping yourself organized

Organization is very important in school in order to work efficiently.  If you’re having trouble locating where your assignments are in Google Drive, I recommend making folders! To make folders, simply go to your drive, click the “+ New” button,  click the “+ Folder” option, name it, and boom!  To move docs or slides to your folder, all you have to do is click the button with the folder and arrow and move it to the folder you want. That button should be located anywhere near the top of either a doc you’re in or Google Slides. 

Bookmarks

To go to websites faster you can also create bookmark. Bookmarking sites is easy, all you have to do is be on a website you want to bookmark and click the star located where the link is. The star you click should be at the far-right end of the address bar.

Content Keeper

An example of the Content Keeper Screen

This last tip I am about to share with you is very important since almost every student has come across it. If you ever see the “ContentKeeper” screen as shown in the picture, you have a few options. There is a username and password you can type in. The username is sausd, and the password is sa123.

If that doesn’t work, try going to Google, clicking the waffle menu, and scrolling down to the app you want. If it’s not an app you need to access, try searching the website or resource up. If it’s a website you have bookmarked, try that as well. If none of those things work, I recommend you shut your Chromebook off for a few minutes and try again.

Now, if none of those things worked at all, email your teacher using another device such as a phone to tell them you are having issues with your Chromebook, or try to get a different Chromebook if this problem is constant.

Hopefully, these tips help your distance learning easier to do at home!