6 Tips for Adjusting Your PC to Make Students' Concentrate Better"

A student's concentration can be improved by reducing the number of screen elements competing for a student's attention.

• How to Clean and Organize the Desktop - Cleaning up the clutter on the desktop can immediately help students focus better on the task of reading or typing. You can easily remove unnecessary icons on cluttered desktops to improve the amount of focus a student will have.

• Use Appropriate Colours and Themes for Desktop - Changing the colours and themes to something calming can support a student's focus. You can create a calming theme in Windows or help the students create themes that work for them. 

• Full Screen Reading Feature - Recent versions of Microsoft Word include a Full Screen Reading view that fills the whole screen, making it easier to see the text and helping to eliminate or minimize other distractions.

• Spelling and Grammar Tool - The Spelling & Grammar tool is a great feature for students. It allows students to check all spelling and grammar in a file and proof their text for possible mistakes. The Thesaurus feature suggests alternative choices when you click an individual word or phrase.

• Use Speech Recognition - There are now features on PCs that allow students to talk about their ideas instead of having to type them. Speech Recognition comes in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and it lets a student speak to the PC, dictating ideas or entire essays onto the computer. A headset and about an hour and a half are needed to set up the voice and speech recognition on the PC.

• Using Microsoft OneNote - This versatile note-taking program enables students to easily take and store notes. OneNote offers both of these capabilities, plus it lets students mark notes with a variety of visual cues.