We are also learning about how to make our searches more effective. It's funny because I remember learning how to do a lot of these little tricks to make searches more effective back in high school and college, but somehow I got away from using them. I don't know why I got away from using them, but I'm glad that they're back so that I can save myself some time.
We're also learning about some different word processing programs that most people don't know about, and the different types of features that you can use in them. I feel like I know slightly more than a lot other teachers about some of the features that are a part of your regular word processing program. I remember at the beginning of the school year I was working with a close teacher colleague and I pulled out some little trick in Microsoft that I thought was pretty common knowledge, especially for a fairly tech-savvy person like my friend. He saw what I did and it kind of blew his mind and he said, "Wow! I should start hanging out with my local library media specialist more often." If a fairly tech-savvy guy like him doesn't know about some of the basic things, that means that most of the other teachers know virtually nothing at all, so this lesson is bound to make me even more knowledgeable for those little tricks that, to me, make creating written documents a piece of art more than just written words.
