Top Chrome Add-ons for Educators: Enhancing Teaching Efficiency
In the era of remote learning, a plethora of tools have emerged to make education more interactive and efficient. Here are some of the top Google Chrome extensions that students can utilise to enhance their learning experience.
Firstly, Diigo is a handy tool for highlighting and annotating online text. All work is saved to an online account, allowing students to access their work across devices.
InsertLearning is another extension that transforms websites into more interactive learning environments. Teachers can add questions, discussions, and activities to webpages, making resources more engaging and productive. Students can also answer questions, highlight text, and make notes on webpages for better resource utilisation.
Grammarly, a free extension, checks spelling and grammar across the browser, including in search bars, documents, emails, and other extensions. It underlines errors in red and provides suggestions for correction. Grammarly also sends students a weekly email with their most common mistakes, writing statistics, and areas of focus.
Reactions, a Chrome extension for Google Meet, allows for emoji feedback from students while keeping them muted during remote learning. This extension provides a fun and interactive way for students to communicate their understanding or feedback without interrupting the lesson.
Dualless is useful for remote presentations as it allows for the presenter to keep an eye on the class by having video chat windows open in the other section. The extension splits the screen into two, allowing for a presentation to be shown on one half and the presenter's view on the other.
Kami is a versatile Google Chrome extension that allows for the digital editing of PDFs uploaded from the desktop or Google Drive. It also offers annotation, marking, and highlighting of PDFs using a virtual pen. Edited PDFs can be saved and digitally returned to students. Additionally, Kami can set up a blank PDF as a virtual whiteboard, ideal for remote learning presentations via Zoom or Google Meet.
Screencastify is another useful extension for remote learning. It allows for screen recording, up to 5 minutes, and automatic saving to Google Drive. This feature can be used to provide guidance for students navigating tasks by recording and sending videos instead of written explanations.
Lastly, Mote is a Google Chrome extension that allows for the addition of voice notes and vocal feedback to student documents and notes. Instead of digitally or physically annotating work, Mote allows for student work submissions to be annotated with audio.
To further enhance learning and academic integrity, consider incorporating extensions such as Quizlet for creating and sharing digital flashcards and interactive quizzes, Zotero for managing and citing sources, QuillBot for paraphrasing, grammar checking, and plagiarism detection, and AI detection tools like Winston AI to check for AI-generated content.
Lastly, the Random Student Generator for Google Classroom is an extension that picks students to answer questions in an unbiased manner, ideal for virtual classrooms.
These Google Chrome extensions can greatly improve the remote learning experience for students, making learning more interactive, engaging, and efficient.
