004 | Clipboard History: A Hidden Gem in your Teacher Productivity Toolbox

Are you a teacher who feels like you're constantly juggling multiple tasks, struggling to keep up with the demands of your classroom? Do you find yourself wishing for a magical tool that could save you precious time and energy? Well, you're in luck! Today, we're exploring a simple yet powerful tech feature that might just become your new best friend: Clipboard History.

As an educator and productivity enthusiast, I'm always on the lookout for ways to streamline our daily tasks. Clipboard History is one of those hidden gems that, once discovered, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Why Clipboard History is a Game-Changer for Teachers

• Say goodbye to endless back-and-forth copying and pasting
• Access previously copied items with ease
• Save frequently used text for quick retrieval

Setting Up Clipboard History

For Windows users, enabling this feature is a breeze:

• Open your settings
• Search for "Clipboard"
• Toggle on "Clipboard History"

Mac users, don't worry! While not built-in, there are plenty of great Clipboard Manager apps available in the App Store.

Practical Applications for Educators

Imagine copying multiple student email addresses, parent contacts, or feedback comments all at once, then pasting them exactly where you need them. With Clipboard History, this becomes a reality, saving you valuable time during your already packed day.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Features

• Pin frequently used items for permanent access
• Sync across devices for seamless workflow
• Retrieve items copied days ago

Here's what you can expect to gain from this episode:

• A step-by-step guide to enabling Clipboard History on your device
• Real-world examples of how this tool can revolutionize your daily tasks
• Tips for maximizing the potential of Clipboard History in your teaching practice
• Insights into advanced features that can further boost your productivity
• A challenge to implement this simple yet powerful tool in your routine

Whether you're a tech-savvy educator or someone who's hesitant about new tools, I encourage you to give Clipboard History a try. It's one of those rare features that truly delivers on its promise to save time and reduce stress.

Are you ready to take your productivity to the next level? Join me as we explore how this often-overlooked feature can transform the way you work, giving you more time to focus on what really matters – your students.

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Transcript

Hi teacher friends. Welcome to the Productivity for Teachers podcast. The show where I teach educators how to organize materials, curate activities, and save time by creating simple personalized systems. If you are looking for quick action steps you can take to gain back valuable time, you are in the right place. I am your host, Dr. Sarah. I am a teacher, ed tech coach and productivity enthusiast. I understand just how valuable your time is and how short those planning periods are. Join me as we talk about strategies you can implement today to free up time so you can focus on what matters. Hi teacher friends. Dr. Sarah here. I hope your week is going well. Thanks for joining me today. I am excited to talk about perhaps my favorite little tech tool, and that is Clipboard History. Now, if you already use Clipboard History, you know how valuable it is if you haven't used it before. Just one word of caution here, guys. This is one of those things that people tell you, you might have heard about this before, how awesome Clipboard History is, and you're just sitting there and you just can't visualize how this would actually help you. You're just going to have to trust me on this one. Once you start using Clipboard History, you will never want to go back to the old way. It's just one of those things that you don't realize how useful it is until. So stick with me on this one, friends. I promise it's worth it. So the instructions I'm about to give you are for Windows devices. Macs do not have the same functionality built into them, so you'll need to get an app on a Mac. And so all you can do is just search for Clipboard Manager. There are many, many apps and most of them are really, really good. So just look for those high ratings. And they all basically have the same functionality of what I'm about to talk about on Window. So just follow along with us today and then go ahead and download one of those apps for Mac and try it out. So let's jump in and learn all about Clipboard History. It's the best, my friends. So why do we need Clipboard History? Well, if we don't have Clipboard History, we can only copy and paste one thing at a time. And that is a great functionality, right? We use copy and paste all the time. But if we need to copy more than one thing at a time and paste more than one thing at a time, we have to keep going back and forth to the source and then the new document, back to the source and to the new document, back and forth we go. And it Just wastes a lot of time. Clipboard History will enable you to copy and paste more than one thing at a time. So let's talk about how to turn it on first in case you're following along on your laptop right now. Let's get it set up and then we'll go a couple of examples. So in your settings, in the search bar, just Search Clipboard and Enter and the screen that pops up, you'll see Clipboard History. Just go ahead and toggle that on. If you have more than one device using the same Windows login, you can also toggle on sync Clipboard History across your devices and then anything that you saved to your Clipboard History will show up on all of your devices. Super handy, but at a very minimum, let's go ahead and toggle on Clipboard History. You don't need to save it or anything. So why do we need this and how does it work? So when we copy something, typically by highlighting it, and then Control C on a Windows device, and then when we paste it, we do Control V. Now that we have Clipboard History enabled, instead of clicking Control V to paste, we are going to do the Windows key and V to paste, and it's going to open up. When you do that, everything that you've copied recently, and when I say recently, I can't give you an exact time. So Clipboard History will store everything that you've copied until it starts to run out of space. And it has a lot of space. So it's not like it's going to start deleting things every day, but it will slowly delete the oldest things that you copied out of your Clipboard history as you add new things. However, in a minute we'll talk about how you can save things in your Clipboard history so they don't go away. So when you click Windows V instead of Control V now you have all of the things that you've recently copied and you just select the one that you want to paste and. And it'll paste it into your new document. So this sounds like it's actually an extra step. So why is it so great? Dr. Sara, would you please explain this? Well, let's say you need to copy from an Excel sheet all of your students email addresses and all of the first parents email addresses and all of the second parents email addresses, and maybe they're even third parents. And so in without turning on Clipboard History, you would have to click copy all the student email addresses, then go to the new document and paste them, and then go back to the source and copy the first parent's email addresses and then paste. And so you're just going back and forth. Takes forever. If you have Clipboard History enabled, you're just going to go to the source document, you're going to copy all the things that you need one after another, then go to your new document or your email server and now you're going to click Windows V instead of Control V, and all of those things that you copied will now show up and you can just tap each one, click on each one to enter it into your new document. So you're going to have to trust me on this one, friends. It's really great. You're going to be so happy that you have this enabled. The first time you use it, you're going to be like, ah, I get it now, it's so awesome. So how else can we use Clipboard History? It's not just when we have to copy and paste more than one thing. It's also handy if you copied something yesterday or the day before, a website or some text, you can go back into Clipboard History and find that. So that's also really, really handy. And my favorite feature, the one I alluded to earlier, you can save things to your Clipboard History so that they are there forever. So it's called pinning. So in Windows, in the Clipboard History, so when you click Windows V, then you'll see each copied item has the option on the lower right hand side to go ahead and click on that pin and you're pinning it to your history and it's there forever. So I use this for websites that I use frequently, email kind of openings that I use frequently. Feedback that I give over and over to students like you did, didn't follow the directions, always our favorite, right? Those things that you just find yourself using over and over again, go ahead and pin those to your Clipboard History and then they're there forever and you never have to retype all of that again. So I hope you might now have an inkling of how awesome Clipboard History can be. It's really just one of those things that it's just not obviously helpful until you use it. So I hope you believe me and that you will implement that one simple step this week of toggling that on in your settings, toggling on Clipboard History. And then as a reminder, you might want to put a little post it note or something on your laptop or next to your laptop that just says Windows V or Clipboard History just to remind you to use it and practice with it and see how you like it. So luckily for us, this is a quick thing to set up and hopefully easy to remember and I would love to hear from you how you like it. So let me know. That's it for today friends. Happy teaching and have a great week. Thanks for listening, teacher friends. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or follow the show so you don't miss a thing. Have a great week and I hope you will consider implementing one thing you heard today. Small steps have a big impact over time. Happy, productive teaching. See you next week.