67. Resident Exclusives- Mastering the iPhone Control Panel

In this episode, we walk through a step-by-step demonstration of how to navigate and use the control panel on your iPhone. Whether you’re adjusting brightness, connecting to Wi-Fi, or turning on Do Not Disturb mode, our simple and clear instructions will help you take full control of your device. This tutorial is designed especially for senior living residents, offering helpful tips to make everyday tasks easier. Watch and follow along to get the most out of your iPhone’s features!

A full demonstration is available on our website.

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Hello, my name is Andrew Gravning. I am a Tech@Home Resident Support Technician for Parasol Alliance based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And today I want to talk to you about the iPhone Control Center. What is the iPhone Control Center? In short, it is a bunch of shortcuts that can be used to control your iPhone.

As I go along, I’m going to be using a laser pointer kind of to direct where I’m looking at. So if I mentioned something, just look for the little red dot to be following along where I’m pointing.

Looking at the screen. I know it looks like a lot, but trust me when we’re done with this, you’re going to understand almost every button that’s on here and what they’re used for and how to even make your own. So how do you first off access the control center? So if you don’t have a button, say this is just your standard home screen, you’re going to want to pull down from the battery.

And what do I mean by that? So if you look in the top right corner, you’re going to see that there’s a little battery symbol up here, along with cellular data, Wi Fi, and then your battery. So you’re going to locate that. And then you’re just going to pull down from there. So it should look something like this.

[00:01:00] You’ll see how you’re on your main screen and you pull down from the top and it slides the screen all the way down. If you have a button on your phone, you’re going to locate the bottom of your phone and you’re just going to swipe up from there. Unfortunately, I do not have a button on my phone, so I cannot record the action, but think of it as this same action.

But in reverse where it’s coming from the bottom of the screen.

So again, if you have no button, you’re gonna want to swipe down from the battery. And if you have a button, you’re gonna want to swipe up from the bottom. So we’ll take a look. We already briefly touched on it. But We’ll take a look at my iPhone control center, break down what we’re all looking at, get a really detailed look into what I use, how I go about my day with it.

And then we’ll get into how you can create your own. So looking at this again, I know it looks like a lot, but we’re going to break down every single button and what they do and just a little bit of how I use them in my daily life. So starting from the top here and I’ll have all of them listed on the side in order.

We’re going to have the one that looks like an airplane. Perfectly named Airplane Mode. You may [00:02:00] have heard of this mode before. It is mostly used for when you are traveling on an airplane. It cuts off your cellular data and only keeps wifi on. So it can we’re going to cut that back.

So first off, we’re gonna start with airplane mode is mostly used when traveling. It will turn off your cellular data when you’re on an airplane. And again, right next to that is cellular data. Commonly referred to as LTE, 5G, 4G even, that’s going to be anything that allows you to make a phone call or access the internet while you’re off your home Wi Fi.

Also commonly depicted using the bars here up in the top. You might have seen that before when we were talking about the battery. Underneath there is going to be Wi Fi. That’s going to be commonly used at your home. I would say if you’re connected to your home Wi Fi, you’ll be having access to internet and your phone will prioritize the Wi Fi usage over the data usage.

Next to that is going to be Bluetooth. That’s commonly used to connect two wireless devices together. I have an Apple Watch, so I use my Bluetooth to connect my phone to my Apple Watch, so the two of them can [00:03:00] communicate to each other. I have AirPods that I use quite frequently. Again, I use those via Bluetooth, so the two devices can connect together.

But you can also use Bluetooth with TVs. You can use Bluetooth with computers and iPads and really any modern wireless device will have Bluetooth of some form on it. Now moving on to now playing. So you can see right now, I don’t have anything listed as But if you were to be, say, listening to music or watching a movie on your phone or on your device, you would see it here and you would have the ability to pause and play, fast forward, rewind, skip.

I’ll say all the playback controls would be listed here. Moving on to that, we have screen rotation. So right now you can see that mine is not bolded. So that means that my screen can freely rotate as I wish. So if I were to turn my phone sideways. It would turn the screen sideways as well. Right next to that is screen mirroring.

So a lot of smart TVs and a lot of Apple devices allow screen mirroring. So if I wanted to take my phone and put it on my MacBook, or if I wanted to put it [00:04:00] on my Samsung TV, I could turn on screen mirroring and I would have the ability to view my phone on a bigger screen. With a little bit more detail underneath that you can see it says focus, but it is the do not disturb tab underneath.

There is where I have modes such as Do Not Disturb if I’m out and about and I don’t want to be bothered or if I say I’m at a movie or some play, I could turn on Do Not Disturb and notifications will not go through. This one has my work focus right now is it knows I’m at work. So it is telling me.

Hey, you can turn on work focus. So you only get calls and texts from important people and cut out a lot of the extra notifications.

So moving on to this tall bar here, you’re going to see that this is Screen Brightness. This allows you to control how bright your screen is based on the light and around the room. Usually it’s an automated feature, but you also have full access. So if say you’re outside and you can’t see, you can manually turn up your screen brightness So you can see, or if you’re in a dark room and your phone’s just a little too bright, you can turn it down so it’s not blinding you.

Right next [00:05:00] to that, you can see we have Volume. This is going to be used to control how loud a certain type of media is being played out of your phones. And this will be connected, whether you have headphones in, whether you don’t have headphones in and it will change your levels, obviously, depending what’s plugged in, but you do have control of either the side buttons to use your volume or here on the control center.

Now we’re going to get into the utilities of everything. These are eight utilities that I use quite frequently. And we’ll go through and break them down. Some you might’ve heard of before some you might not have. So we’ll get into those. The first one is probably the most common utility used on any smartphone.

It is the Flashlight. It is a quick and easy utility just to know that I have obviously the flashlight on hand anytime I need it. The next one you’re going to see, it looks like a little S here. That’s Shazam. So Shazam is used for finding music.

So say I’m at a retail store and something’s playing on the intercom, and I’m like, this is pretty good. I like this. I just give that a click and I wait a few seconds, and the phone will [00:06:00] actually tell me what song I am listening to. So I can go and look it up and listen to it on my own time. So a very neat feature.

One of my favorite features built into iPhones. It is an absolute gem. I have used it hundreds and hundreds of times. Right next to that, you can see the one that just looks like a little dot, that’s screen recording. So I actually used screen recording in this prior when I was showing you how to pull down from the top and I had that little animation.

I use that to record anything that I might want to capture on my phone such as using an app or just general tips and tricks that I like to record for my classes. So screen recording is a really fun feature. It’s a really awesome built in feature. Some people might get more use out of it than others, but I really like it as I use it quite often.

Right next to that, you can see what looks like an Apple TV Remote, and that’s exactly what it is. That’s a TV remote that I can use to connect my phone to my TV, so I can use my phone as the remote control for my Apple TV. This means that I can pause and play my media, I can [00:07:00] control the volume.

Again, this is only for an Apple TV, which is very similar to a Roku or a fire stick. It is a streaming device that is built by Apple. So again, it’s not going to have connectivity to all devices, but fortunately at my house, I do have an Apple TV, so it is very connected. So it is nice to have the remote on my phone because sometimes I do tend to lose that remote.

Down on the bottom row here,

we have the Calculator. Again, this is a pretty common utility. Most people know what a calculator is before an iPhone. But again, this is something I just like to have on hand really quick. I don’t need to think about where it is. I can just give it a click and I know it’s right there. Next to that, the battery is actually Low Power Mode.

So right now you can see that my phone is on 100%. But say I’m out and about and my phone is below 50 percent and I know I’m going to be out for a couple hours more and I don’t want my phone to lose battery so fast. I’m going to turn on this low power mode, which is going to save a lot of the background processes.

It’s going to conserve a lot more energy on the phone so I can use the phone for longer. Right next to this, you can see [00:08:00] it looks like a watch with a little bit of Wi Fi coming out of it. Those are actually sound waves. This is Ping My W atch. So again, I’ve mentioned I have an Apple watch and I do tend to misplace it from time to time.

So if I click this on my iPhone. It will make a sound on my watch to let me know. “Hey, it’s over here.” “Hey, it’s in another room”, and I can more easily locate where my watches and finally, the last one that I use and arguably one of the most valuable in the whole bunch of everything I’m going to talk about today

is the QR code scanner. So I do know a lot of people like to download third party apps or apps from the app store to scan QR codes, but you actually have one built right into your iPhone. So if you just, if you give it a click, it’ll pop up a little box and all you have to do is place your QR code in that little box and it will scan it immediately.

One way is to go through the camera. It is a little clunky from time to time. So using this QR code scanner is just going to make life easier. a whole lot easier.

So next we’re going to get into how to customize your control center. So first off you’re going to want to look for the [00:09:00] settings or I like to call the little gear And you’re going to give that a click. Next you’re going to want to scroll down and find control center It’s the one that looks like a little two switches We give that a click and now you’re going to see that we are within the settings of control center and you can see that we already have a couple options up the top here and then some of those controls that I listed before. So from the top we can see that it tells you swipe down from the top right edge to open the control center and again touched on that briefly but that’s pulling down from the battery.

You can see that it’s asking for access within apps. So this is going to let you, if you’re, say, using an app, you can pull down in the app at any time, and it’ll let you use the control center, whereas sometimes, if you have this off, you can only access it using the home screen. I think that’s a little hindering, personally, so I would recommend using access within apps.

It’s on by default, so if it’s already on, you can just leave it on. The next one you see here is show home controls. So home is an app within the iPhone environment that’s going to allow you [00:10:00] to control smart devices. So you can see that I turned on that setting and you can see that I have several of my home smart devices such as my bedroom lamp.

I was going to say I have smart lights and the living room lights. I could just click that button and turn them on instantly. So again, this is only recommended for people who do have smart devices set up within the Apple home app. I do, but I just do not prefer it as I feel like it makes it a little clunky and I like it to be only stuff that I use.

So again, it’s not recommended, it’s not required, but if you like it, it’s totally optional.

So if we jump back into the Control Center apps and we were to scroll down, you can see that we have all the controls here that I just didn’t have selected. But there’s quite a larger list to choose from, so I’m going to highlight a few of the key ones.

Some of the more popular ones are Include the camera. So again, quick access to the camera. You just click it and it’s pulled up right away again. You can use this as an app if you’d like, but it’s nice if you’re within another app to have ability to access the camera just [00:11:00] right away again. We mentioned and touched on home a little bit.

That’s again, for anything with a smart home. Dark mode is going to change. You can see my phone is currently in dark mode. If you were to click that, it would obviously turn into dark mode or if you’re already in dark. When you click it, it turns it into light mode, which is going to give you a white background.

So depending on what’s easier for you to see, you might want to have the ability to switch it given if you’re either in a light situation or a dark situation. Magnifier that’s going to use your camera on your iPhone to zoom in and help you read things that might be on a piece of paper that’s a little too small.

That might be on a box. It’s a little too small again. Think of it as a magnifying glass on your phone using your iPhone camera. A very handy tool quick note. This is something that I think I’m going to start using more because I’ve started to take a lot more notes on my iPhone. This just allows you to pull up what is essentially a post it note on your iPhone and just jot something down real quick and then save it immediately.

 It takes a couple steps out of the process, but again, it’s just something if you have something spur of the moment, this is going to be your [00:12:00] go to.

The alarm, the stopwatch and the timer are all going to be clock based apps that again set obviously their corresponding alarm stopwatches and timers again, something you can do within the clock app on the iPhone. But if you want quick access to it, it’s here as well.

Lastly, arguably very important one as well is going to be text size. This is gonna be able to let you scale the text size. So if something’s a little too small on your iPhone, you just give that a click, scale it up quickly, and then it won’t be stuck that way the entire time. You can always just scale it down just again with the click of a button.

So that’s going to do it for my presentation on the iPhone Control Center. I hope you learned something today, and please reach out to your Tech at Home correspondent if you have any questions. Thank you for watc