[Transcription of the above video]
You probably know about multiple desktops, but do you know about virtual desktops? The virtual desktop system that’s in Windows allows you to have one set of applications running in one virtual desktop and another set completely isolated, running elsewhere, and you can then flick between them. So it’s really good if you’re going to be presenting, but you also want to keep your, say, student marking open. You also want to have presentations that you’re working on and bits of research that you’re working on. Any of that kind of stuff. You want to keep all that open, but you don’t want to run the risk.
Of students actually seen it. Or if you’re going into a meeting for other people to see what you’ve been working on. Virtual desktops work perfectly for that because each desktop is isolated from the other, but you can quickly flick between them. So the way that we’ll use virtual desktops is down on the bottom taskbar in Windows. You’ll probably see this little it’s kind of some squares with a little line and a dot beside it. That’s Task View. If you don’t see that, if you right click, you can enable Task View. But when you click on Task View, what it does is it shows you all of the applications you’ve currently got running and.
On here you can click and you can move to different applications. You can also U at the top here click New Desktop and when you do that you get this extra bar up at the top. And here’s the original desktop that we’re working on that had all of the work that was up on screen earlier. But we’ve also got desktop two now. So I click on desktop two. You can see it’s a completely blank desktop.
And here I’ve got my slides and I can put that into presenter mode, so that’s running on one virtual desktop and everything else is on the other one. If I want to move between them, I hold down the control key, which is the one that says CTRL, usually on the bottom row, next near the spacebar, and the windows key which is the little windows icon, and then press left and right on the arrow keys. And with that I can quickly flick between the two.
So I can have all of my things that I’m working on, generally on one virtual desktop, and quickly move to another one where I can do presentations, where I can have virtual meetings and things and not have to worry about.
Ever been, you know, accidentally showing something. Because as you can see down the bottom here, none of the applications that are in there so that the web browser isn’t actually running in here, so there’s no possibility that students or other people would see anything that’s happening there. So virtual desktops are a really good idea for compartmentalising your work and keeping separate things separate, yet still being able to flick between them. So you can keep lots of applications running and just flip between them depending on what you currently doing at that time.
