I’m the first to admit that I’m a big ole tech geek. I love technology and I’m convinced that there is always a program out there somewhere that can help me with my work or my life or both. All I need to do is find the right program for the right purpose and then USE it.
Today, I want to talk about TextExpander. This is a program for the mac that does the same basic thing that macros do in Windows. You enter something that you tend to type repetitively (say the school policy on participation, for example) and give that sentence or paragraph a name. I use a delimiter at the end to indicate this is what I want you to do, and when I type in that name with the delimiter, voila, the whole paragraph appears in place of the word.
This saves me a significant amount of grading time and allows me to concentrate on the actual issues in a student’s paper rather than on the grammar lessons or policy errors that a student may have made. You can use this in other areas as well. For example, if frequently write notes or letters on your computer, you can have portions of text that you use frequently (say, a my name is and my issue is type sentence) programmed into Text Expander and you’ll be able to save some time.
There is a Window’s based version of this program known as Shortkeys. It works in much the same way as TextExpander and also works in basically all programs.
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