Thing 41: Power Up Your Browser

I've played with extensions before, but this activity helped me flex a bit more.  I've grouped my experience in a few categories:


Quality of Life:


AdBlocker - I can't live without it.  It takes care of inappropriate ads and pop ups that may bug you throughout the school day.  It even takes care of most ads during videos.  It's worth noting that turning it off for a website that you care about is the polite thing to do, as they use the revenue from ads to produce their content free of charge.


Google Calendar - I didn't know what I was missing out on.  The ability to check my calendar or add events without navigating to a new website or pulling out a phone is amazing!  This is especially helpful if you use google calendar to keep track of assignments (like in Classroom) or lesson plans!


New Tab Draft - pro-tip - read the comments on education sites (and recipe sites).  Unlike many sites which are normally populated by inhuman trolls, these sites often have the best suggestions and advice!  That's where I found this awesome tool.  It turns your "new tab" button into a place to keep track of notes, to do lists, and synthesize thoughts.  It completely changes the way I interact with my browser.  Rather than staring at inane website suggestions, I can use that blank space to gather my thoughts and make connections between the million things that are going on in my brain all day.


Content and Instructional Tools:


formRanger - I hope it's not cheating, but I found this before I started this activity.  If you create a lot of forms, or collaborate on them, or are in charge of organizing any organization wide document, this is a FANTASTIC way to manage the lists within a google form.  I manage many systems within my school that require documentation of staff members and students (parent contact logs, disciplinary referrals, walkthroughs, SPED contact minutes), this add-on allows me to pull the information for the drop downs in one google sheet.  New student?  New staff member?  Update the list, and every form reflects the changes.  Priceless.  (You can also get fancy and use this to limit entries; i.e. if you want to use a form to have people sign up for a certain PD offerings, you can have the choices automatically disappear after a seat-limit has been reached)


DocTools - This was more useful when they had the "highlight" option in the same menu as change text; but this is a great tool to use with students that allows them to quickly access the kinds of tools useful for annotation of text digitally.  I have my students do quite a bit of reading on their chromebooks and this enables that process.  It also adds interesting editing functionality, like the ability to sort lists, change numbers to words and words to numbers, and mess with capitalization.


Awesome Screenshot - When paired with HP Reveal this is an explosion of heavenly possibility.  I just wrote about how "awesome" AR is in flipping the classroom.  Awesome Screenshot and it's screen casting capabilities just enhances those possibilities.


Not Really A Browser Extension but...


Spritzlet: http://www.spritzlet.com/
A literacy teacher in my building shared this with me.  It is a speed reading tool; you highlight a section of text, and it automatically shows one word at a time at the perfect position for your eyes to read without moving.  You can adjust the speed at which the words show up, up to 450 WPM without an account and up to 1000 WPM with an account.  For students who are having difficulty following the text, or who need to improve their fluency in reading, this is a tool that can help scaffold their learning.