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I’ve been observing my students as they work in our lab.\u00a0 We have a nice setup with 30 new wide screen iMacs.\u00a0 The machines have OS X and Windows XP.\u00a0 The screens are big: 24 inches wide.\u00a0 The screens are\u00a0so big,\u00a0if you have a document open using the full screen you literally have to turn your head from side to side to read it.<\/p>\n
Most programs open full screen by default.\u00a0 It is not uncommon for a user to have two or three programs open at once; all the details of an assignment\u00a0are in a browser while Word is used to complete the assignment.\u00a0 With each program filling the screen, the user must switch back and forth between different programs.\u00a0 Most of them do not use the Alt-Tab<\/a> cool switch, so add the time it takes to use the mouse to click on those\u00a0small buttons at the bottom of the screen.\u00a0 It especially\u00a0annoying when Word is in full page view because the page only takes up the center of the screen.\u00a0 Literally half of the screen is unused dead space on each side of the document.<\/p>\n During yesterday’s activity in class\u00a0there was one student who resized two program windows so that each took up half of the screen.\u00a0 One window was Word and the other was a browser.\u00a0 Both were perfect sizes for working.\u00a0 That student also was the first to finish the activity, finishing twenty minutes before the next student.<\/p>\n By the way,\u00a0if you are working with multiple programs and you want to quickly maximize your screen usage without overlapping windows, try allSnap<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been observing my students as they work in our lab.\u00a0 We have a nice setup with 30 new wide screen iMacs.\u00a0 The machines have OS X and Windows XP.\u00a0 The screens are big: 24 inches wide.\u00a0 The screens are\u00a0so … Continue reading