In this video I'm going to show you 10 must-have Google Chrome extensions for students.
I'm going to focus primarily on extensions that make learning more accessible
so I'll show you extensions that can support students with text-to-speech and speech-to-text,
as well as extensions that support students with their writing and make reading more
accessible. So I'm excited to show you all the extensions that I've put together for you
in this video. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
Before we get started here it is important to note that oftentimes students are going to be blocked
from adding Google Chrome extensions themselves so if you see an extension in this video that
you think would be beneficial for your students you may have to request that your tech team or
your school administrator pushes those extensions out to student browsers, because it's likely that
those students will not be able to install them on their own. The extensions I'm going to show you are
all available to download for free in the Google Chrome web store, so let's hop over there now so
that we can check them out. All right so here we are in the Chrome web store and on the web store
you'll see that there are a ton of different extensions that you can install on your browser.
I actually have a whole separate updated video all about Google Chrome extensions for teachers,
so if you're looking for those I would recommend you check that out too. Now what I'm going to show
in this video will involve actually downloading the extension and installing it on a browser, but
like I mentioned you can also have your school's admin team actually just push those extensions
out to all student browsers in bulk so that when a student opens up their Google Chrome account,
they'll just have the browser extension already installed, which is a great way to
do it, particularly if you have found a tool that you really think is going to support your students
with their learning. All right so the first must-have Google Chrome extension for students is Read
& Write. So to find it I'm going to search Read & Write and then once I've found that extension
I'll go ahead here and click 'Add to Chrome.' Now once students have this extension installed
what they'll be able to do is open it up on any webpage and have that webpage be read aloud to
them. So let's say for example that we're over here on this article about Nelson Mandela that
you want your students to read. Now there might be some times where you either have students who
are reading a little bit below grade level or when you want to assign students a more complex article
and they need some assistance in making sense of what that article is saying.
So the Read & Write extension would be really useful here. All students would need to do is click on it,
select the part of the text where they want the read aloud to begin, and then click 'Play.'
Although it does read the text aloud to them in a robotic voice, it's not all that bad and it's
a very useful tool for students who are having some difficulty reading the text on their own.
There are lots of useful premium features in Read & Write as well. So for example, you can have students
use the voice-to-text tool here and let's say that a student needs to be able to speak what
they want to be typed out on this Google Doc. All they would need to do is hit the microphone,
say what they want to be typed, and it will automatically detect that and type it for them.
Now I know that I'm showing this in Google Docs and that Google Docs already has a voice typer,
but what the Read & Write extension will allow students to do, if you have the premium version,
is use speech-to-text on any website. Let's say that you don't want to pay for Read & Write but
you do still want to give students the ability to use this speech-to-text feature. That brings me to
my second must-have Chrome extension for students, and that's Voice In. Voice In works very similar
to what I just showed you for Read & Write. So let's jump over here to this demo student account so I
can show you how Voice In would work with Gmail. In order to enable Voice In so that it starts to read
what a student is saying all they need to do is click on the Voice In extension, then they'll want
to click wherever they want their typing to go on the screen, dictate what they need to be typed out,
and then you'll see that it's interpreting what they said and that the text will show up. The
third extension for students is Google Dictionary. Google Dictionary is a simple extension that does
exactly what you would think it would do and allows students to look up the meanings of words
on any webpage. What I like about Google Dictionary is that students don't even need
to necessarily type the word into the search bar. All they need to do is highlight a word that they
want to look up and then go up to the Google Dictionary extension and it will automatically
pull up a definition of that word. Power Thesaurus is a related extension. The only difference with
Google Dictionary is that when students use Power Thesaurus to look up a synonym or antonym they
will need to either copy and paste the word that they want to find the synonym or antonym for
into the Power Thesaurus search box or they'll need to type it directly in.
Still, Power Thesaurus can be a handy tool for supporting students with writing and adding more
variety to the words that they're choosing to use. The fifth Chrome extension for students is Visor.
Visor is a reading accessibility tool that supports students with focusing
on just the part of the screen that they're actually reading. So the way that it works
is that when a student is on a web page that they need to read, they can open up the Visor extension
and that will give them some different options for how they can minimize the area of the screen
that is highlighted for them to focus on. They can do things like adjust the color saturation
and they can also adjust the size of the focus window that shows up on the screen. So now you
can see that as a student is scrolling down the page to read it, that a small window shows up that
will help focus their attention on the specific part of the screen where they need to be reading.
The next extension, Mercury Reader is also a reading accessibility tool, but rather than put a
small window over the screen, what Mercury Reader will do is take away some of the distracting
elements that might show up on a web page. So you can see over here on this National Geographic web
page that there are lots of advertisements and images that might be distracting for students.
So what a student can do is open up the Mercury Reader extension and that will take away all those
distracting elements and just focus in on the words so that they're able to focus better on
what they need to be reading. And you can see here as well that students can also adjust the size of
the text, so they can make it bigger if they need to be able to see it better, and they can also
switch it from light to dark mode if they need more of a contrast. The next extension I'm going
to show you here is Grammarly for Chrome. Once the extension is installed, students can use it
to check the grammar, punctuation, and spelling of their writing across different websites.
All right so now that I have the extension installed, let's just jump over here to Google Docs
so that we can see what it looks like. You can see that there's a little icon at the bottom of
this student's Google Doc that indicates that the Grammarly extension has been installed and
in this case it's also indicating the number of errors that Grammarly has found on this document.
So one option would be for students to just hover over the word and then select the correct
spelling of the word or they could click on the number two and that will pull up a sidebar menu
that will give students more options for what they could ask Grammarly to look at on their
writing. Now in this case Grammarly found those two spelling errors, so here you'll see that the
student could also correct those errors from here as well. Now of course Google Docs also has
an embedded spell-checker, so it's not like it's doing anything particularly different in this
case, however I do like the way that the Grammarly extension looks on Google Docs. It's just a little
bit easier to use and of course Grammarly will also work on other websites that students visit.
The eighth extension is Awesome Screenshot. Of course screenshotting is something that doesn't
require an extension, but Awesome Screenshot does have some functions that make it superior to
regular screenshotting and I do think that it can be a really useful tool. The way Awesome Screenshot
works is that students would go to a page where they needed to take a screenshot and then they
would have the option to either take a screenshot of the entire page or a particular section that
they select on a page. So let's say for example that the student doesn't necessarily need to
show this entire screen but just wants to share the cover for this digital book that they made.
They could select just that particular section and then take a screenshot. Now of course, up to
this point, that's not any different than just having students use keyboard shortcuts, but of
course it is easy to just open up that extension and then once they've created the screenshot, they
have lots of different options for ways they can interact with it. So they can do things like draw
or add text directly on top of that screenshot and then if you have students upload the screenshot,
they'll be given access to a shareable link that they could share directly back with their teacher.
And once the teacher opens the link you'll see that there's a comment tool directly embedded
in Awesome Screenshot, so as the teacher, you'd be able to click anywhere on this screenshot
and then leave students a comment, so it's a really quick and easy way to annotate student work.
Students can see your comment and then reply as well. The ninth must-have Chrome extension for
students is Kami. Now full transparency here, Kami is going to work best if you have the Pro version,
but the trial period that Kami offers of over two months is also quite a long period of time,
so you could check it out for a while with your students to see how you like it. Kami is a PDF
annotation tool and you'll see that once they have it installed, they can do things like open up
assignments directly in Google Classroom using the Kami tool, and once they've opened up a PDF, they'll
have lots of different ways that they can interact with the document that you just assigned to them.
So students can do more traditional annotations like using a text comment here,
but they can also do things like add voice notes to a PDF document, and then of course if you as the
teacher also have Kami installed, you can interact with this document using those same tools as well.
So it can be a dynamic way of providing students with feedback and engaging them in a discussion
about the work that they're doing. The tenth must-have Chrome extension for students is Loom.
Now to be honest, it doesn't matter all that much whether or not students have Loom or Screencastify
installed on their browsers, but I do think it's important that they learn how to use a screencast
tool. The reason for this is that screencasting can be a really powerful way for students to
show their work to explain their thinking or to show you a problem that they might be
having on their computer. What I do like about loom and why I've come to prefer it is that the Pro
version is free for educational purposes, so both students and teachers can access the Pro version
of Loom for free. I have a separate tutorial for teachers on this channel about how to use Loom
and I also have a student tutorial about how to use Loom on my New EdTech Classroom Tutorials
for Students channel and I'll include that in the video description below as well. I hope you
found this list of Chrome extensions for students helpful. I know that there are some barriers for
getting Chrome extensions installed on student browsers, but I also think there's a strong
case that you can make for why these extensions help make learning more accessible for students.
If you have any questions about the extensions that I showed or suggestions about other Chrome
extensions that you think would benefit students, please share those in the comments below. Thanks
so much for watching my video to the end. If you're a school leader looking to implement a strategic
technology integration plan, I'd love to talk with you about how I can help. I've included a link to
newedtechschool.com in the video description below, where you can book a free strategy session with me,
and if you're a teacher interested in additional guidance for how to effectively use education
technology in your classroom, I've also included a link for you to be able to book a call with me,
so we can discuss how I might be able to help. And lastly, if you're interested in my 21st Century
Classroom course, I've also included a link in the video description where you can enter your email
and get the latest enrollment updates. Thanks so much and have a great week!