With second, third, and fourth graders on Chromebooks, I feel like I am all Chrome all the time now. Here are my favorite Chrome Extensions for teachers right now:
Read/Write: is so amazing, it deserves its own post later this week.
AdBlock Plus: this extensions blocks ads EVERYWHERE on every tab open. Ready to show YouTube video, no ads. Show students a website, don’t worry about unrelated ads that might pop-up. (It’s also nice when personally surfing the web.)
Add This: lets your share your link anywhere immediately. It is customizable for places you share most often. It also gives you the ability to print and translate. It’s a great tool for being social.
Bit.ly: if you are a bit.ly users this is convenient to have. Quickly shorten and customize a URL in seconds.
Readability or Read Comfortably: gets rid of all the extra information on a webpage: headers, navigation bars, pictures, and ads. I mostly use it to demonstrate with my students but it’s great when I’m tired and want a webpage read to me with Read/Write.
Print Friendly & Pdf: is a great tool for getting rid of navigation bars, ads, and images before printing. It will clean up any website then allow you to edit it before letting you print or save as PDF. It is a great ink/toner saver.
LastPass: is my all time favorite extension. First, Create an account with a single master password. Then LastPass will prompt you to store every username and password you type in for every website. It store the information in your “vault” which can be put in categories like shopping, finances, education, etc. Never remember a username or password again (except your master password) LastPass will fill in forms, usernames and passwords for you. For a small amount money you can buy the app for your phone.
Diigo: lets you collect, annotate, and categorize websites. You can attach notes to pages and add tags to find them later. Remember social bookmarking? This is much more.
Snagit: easily take pictures or videos of any part of your screen. Snagit saves everything to your Google Drive for easy use and storage.
Extensity: is for people like me who have too many extensions and do not like clutter. Extensity shows all your hidden extensions when you click on it making them easy to access.
Tab Scissors: splits the active tab and the tab to the right to each half of the screen. This is great for note taking when watching a video or reading a website.
Tab Glue: is to put the tabs you cut apart using tab scissors back together when you are done. SO EASY.