Randy Damewood, Director of Technology Coffee County Schools
 [email protected], twitter @randydamewood, google+

My 10 top iPad tricks
1 - If you have enabled gestures, you can 4 finger swipe from App to App- Just place 4 fingers on the iPad and swipe to the right or left to move between apps. If you are in an app, place all 5 of your digits on the screen and pinch to center to go to the home screen. To turn on multitasking Gestures - Go to Settings/General and look for Multitasking Gestures

2 - When on any home screen, push the home button and you will go to the first Home Screen, swipe left and you are at the Spotlight search screen.

3 - To take a screen shot of your iPad - Push the Power button and home screen at the same time and hold for a second then release - a screen shot will be placed in your camera roll - Why do this? - Great if you are going to be offline, if you want to mark up a picture

4 - Want to save a picture from the web - Hold your finger on the picture until the dialog box comes up and then choose what you want to do - if you choose save then it will go to your camera roll

5 - Use the iPad as dictionary - Select a word by holding your finger on the word and then pick define - The iPad will bring up a dictionary entry for that word

6 - Like to make a folder on your iPad - on one of the home screens, place your finger on an icon and hold it there until the icons start shaking, then drag one icon onto another and then you have a folder. You can keep dragging icons into that folder. When done, push the home button to stop the shaking.

7 - You can make shortcuts of websites by doing the following - Open Safari and when you arrive at the website that you would like to make a shortcut, click the icon in the upper left that is a rectangle with and arrow and choose "Add to Home Screen."

8- There are lots of keyboard tricks - While in Safari and typing a web address- if you hold your finger on the .com key, after a moment other options like .net or .org will pop up - You can do this with many keys and get different options like the ! key - Hold  it and you get an apostrophe or hold down the ? mark and get ".  Try holding down the "a" key - that will give you an idea of the types of keyboard shortcuts there are. The iPad also has auto-correction -  you can also split the keyboard and move it around   -

9 - Did you know that you can have more than 4 apps in the Dock (the area at the bottom of the screen where the icons stay put) As you do to make folders, hold your finger on an icon and when they start shaking, then drag the icon to the dock. You can have a total of 6 in the doc.

10 - Search a page in the Safari - Many people miss this one - If you are looking for some text in a long web page in Safari, go to the Google Search bar at the top right and start typing your word- notice at the bottom of the Google Suggestions there is a line that says "On this Page" - click that and you can search the page.

Bonus - Have a smart cover - use it as a cleaner - make a triangle with the soft side out and use it to wipe across the screen - cleans it great!

What some more tips, try out some of these sites:

Jeffrey Thomas 100 iPad Tips and Tricks

Educational Insights 50 Really Useful iPad 2 Tips and Tricks

iPad Academy - Lots of different tutorials