Introducing the #nomousefriday challenge

So we're told the average office worker in the US could save the equivalent of 8 days a year by using keyboard shortcuts over reaching for the mouse every time.  Have a read here to find out more.

I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts - doing anything in a more efficient way has got to be a good thing.  I try and tell my children about them as and when I can throughout our lessons together, but the other day, with a Year 4 class, it seemed like the right thing to do to unplug all the computer mice/computer mouses (take your pick) and declare the day:

NO MOUSE FRIDAY!

This forced even those less confident computer users into using a suitable keyboard shortcut or method to solve the problem I had set them - to log on to the network, open a browser, log on to their email account and send an email.

Taking each of the three main areas in turn, the children had to use a number of 'tricks':

Area 1 - logging on to network

1. pressing [Tab] between user name and password
2. hitting [Enter] instead of that blue arrow*

​*OK so they do that anyway, but it still counts...

Area 2 - opening Chrome and accessing Gmail 

    1.  Pressing [Windows Key] to open Start menu
    2.  Arrow keys and [Enter] to select Google Chrome
    3. Ctrl-L to access omnibox to type gmail.com

Area 3 - signing in to Gmail; composing and sending email

1.  Using [Tab] to move around the options; pressing [Space] to select something if their keyboard shortcuts didn't work (some anomaly with our system!)
2. 'C' to compose a message, [Tab] again through the various fields; [Shift]-[Tab] do go backwards
3. [Ctrl]-[Enter] to send a message

At which point 'normal service' was resumed. That was if they could work out how to plug the mouse back in again!