12 Best Google Chrome Extensions For Teachers
Although there’re thousands of extensions available for the Google Chrome browser, some specific ones stand out when looking at performing certain tasks online.
With the increased growth in the adoption of remote learning technologies, more and more teachers are leveraging any available tools to make their jobs easier.
Luckily, some Google Chrome extensions are packed with features that can help teachers from lesson planning to presentations.
This article lists some of the best Google Chrome extensions geared towards accomplishing or facilitating these tasks.
Check out our article on some of the best applications for teachers.
Installing Chrome extensions is easy. Simply click this link Chrome Web Store or type “Chrome Web Store” in Google search and select the first link from results.
Once there, type in the name of the extension in the search bar and hit “Enter”. Select your preferred application from the search results and click “Add to Chrome” to install.
Feel free to read the product overview and reviews before installing your preferred extension.
Best Chrome Extensions For Teachers
First on our list and my favorite extension is Liner. Liner is a web and desktop highlighting extension for Google Chrome.
The extension is built to enable users to easily highlight any sections of any web pages they visit and even comment on their highlights.
All this is done in real-time on the webpage. Choose colors to highlight a specific sentence, paragraph, or word and also comment on these.
The best part about this extension is that your highlights are saved in your Liner dashboard. This includes your comments as well and these highlights can be shared with others.
Highlights can also be exported into Word and various other file formats and readers can easily use the included links to visit the original web page or the original web page with the included highlights.
Imagine sending your students a web page to read an article. With the short attention span of modern learners, spending time reading long articles could become a daunting task.
With Liner, teachers can simply highlight specific aspects of the online article with different colors, add comments to it, and redirect learners, enabling them to easily identify the most relevant information in the article.
It’s a great tool for everyone but an even better companion for research for both teachers and learners.
The extension is free to use but a premium version comes with some additional features.
It’s 2021, and site owners aren’t the only ones who can edit their web pages anymore. Insert learning helps you insert instructional content onto any web page.
That’s exactly what this cool extension does. Or kind of. Once this extension has been installed, teachers can now visit any web page, highlight any relevant information and even add quiz questions to the page.
Teachers can also highlight specific content in different colors and also add comments. Users can even embed links, videos, and many more into the webpage for learners to access.
Discussions can also be embedded into specific parts of the page for learners to access.
Once all this is done, teachers can create classes in the dashboard and assign lessons to learners.
This app can almost do it all. The link to the lesson can be sent to students who can also access everything after installing this extension.
This Chrome extension is a must-have for all teachers looking to simplify their lessons and add the “wow factor” to their classes.
Third on this list is the Print Friendly & PDF Google Chrome extension. This is another cool Google Chrome extension that enables users to easily remove and print only relevant content from a web page or PDF.
Print Friendly enables users to optimize pages for printing by removing ads, navigation, and junk before printing.
Video content, images, sentences, ads, and any other information you’d like to remove from your prints can easily be done with this extension.
Once web pages have been optimized for printing, they can be shared via email, saved as pdfs, or even printed right away.
Imagine trying to print sections of an article on a webpage populated with some ads, videos, and images.
Using Print Friendly, teachers can easily delete parts of the content they do not need and share the optimized information from the page as a pdf for their learners or even print them out directly.
An extension that needs no introduction. Used by millions of users around the world as companions when creating documents or writing articles.
The Chrome extension is a must-have for everyone including teachers and students. As the name suggests, it helps users check their grammar and eliminate any errors.
Once this extension is installed, it helps you check your grammar when using apps like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Slides, and any other webpage that requires some form of text area input.
It helps you identify errors in your writing and also provides you with a suggestion to fix all grammatical errors in your writing.
It’s not perfect but it’s the best option for the job and gets the job done well. The extension is available for free but a version is available to users to further optimize their writings.
Web Paint is arguably the best browser-based annotation tool on the market. It is easy to use and full-featured to make great annotations.
Whether you need to underline or circle an object or paragraph, Web Paint has you covered. Annotation tools include shapes, lines, text, eyedropper tool, quadratic and Bezier curves, polygons, transparency and line width sliders, eraser, cursor tools, screenshots, and many.
Name the annotation tool you need and Web Paint most likely has this tool built-in.
Once the extension is installed, simply select the Web Paint extension and the easy-to-use toolbox pops up.
Select your tool and start drawing on your screen at no charge. Additionally, users can also add customized shortcut keys to the extension.
Check out our article on some of the best web and desktop annotation tools for teachers.
This is a simple extension that enables users to easily create documents for Google Drive with the need to open your Google Drive first.
Right from your browser bar, easily create a new Google Docs, Spreadsheet, Slide, Drawing, or Form file.
This extension is not a necessity but makes creating Google files easier especially if you use Google Classroom a lot or primarily rely on G-suite.
It simplifies the process of creating any document from multiple steps to a single-step process.
Can you imagine visiting a website, seeing an image, and easily saving the image in your Google Drive?
Now you don’t need to download the image to your computer, or your Google Drive desktop client anymore.
Simply right-click any online image and select “Save Image to Google Drive” to send a copy of that image into your Google Drive.
You can even send an image copy of the full webpage to your Google Drive using this extension.
Another great Chrome extension on our list is Mote. This is a simple extension that enables users to easily include audio comments and content into their Google Documents, Slides, Sheets, Forms, Classroom, and Gmail.
Using Mote, teachers can simply leave audio comments in their slides or documents for learners to easily access.
Mote also includes a translation feature that can help translate your transcription into multiple languages.
Additionally, Mote has a STEM mode which helps transcribe and nicely format any maths equations and chemical formulas which can also be edited in the Mote extension.
It’s a useful extension that will serve as a great companion for your online lessons.
Ever asked a question in class, and learners were all quiet? You then had to choose a student randomly or biasedly in most cases.
Or ever tried to pick a learner at random for a specific activity? This Google Chrome extension simply helps you randomly select a student from your Google Classroom.
I doubt students will love this extension much especially when they’re unexpectedly selected at random to answer questions in class.
But they may enjoy it when it comes to selecting a random student to receive a prize or some form of honor.
This is an easy-to-use Chrome extension for the Google Keep application. Using this extension, users can easily save web pages, images, or even sentences or paragraphs from any website to their Google Keep dashboard.
Users can also include notes to these saves and even add labels to categorize them all easily with the help of this extension.
It’s a simple application that makes researching and saving any relevant online information easy.
Calendly enables users to easily schedule any events directly from your Google Chrome browser without the need to leave your current webpage.
With Calendly, teachers can easily create and share links to any classes without disrupting their current browsing activity or visiting their preferred calendar application.
Once you select the Calendly extension from your browser, users are presented with a clean sidebar that enables them to easily perform various activities including scheduling ad-hoc meetings.
Ever wanted to create hybrid videos explaining a concept, like the ones you see on YouTube to send to your colleagues?
Loom lets you do just that. It enables users to record their computer screen, face, and voice together, which can easily be shared with others.
If you want to demonstrate something from your computer screen to your learners, simply use the Loom application to recording the screen while recording your voice along with a minimized video of yourself explaining the concept to make it more engaging.
Capturing your screen and sending the recording to link to learners is great but it is easier to engage learners when your face is visible as well.
Although Loom has a free and premium pricing plan, Loom for education is free for all teachers, learners, and educational institutions using Loom for educational activities.
The Bottom Line
There are numerous extensions for Google Chrome for all sorts of purposes, but the ones listed in this article are some of the best available options on the market geared towards accomplishing specific tasks for teachers.
Feel free to check them out and make your job as a teacher easier than ever. If you’d like to learn more about some of the overall best applications available for teachers, check out this article.
