There is no doubt google classroom is the best free option to gather all the students in a place, give new lessons every day, discuss the lessons through communicating, quiz tests, grades, and so on.
Teachers can also arrange live sessions integrating google meet with google classroom. Google Classroom is easy to use, the user interface is interactive and encouraging for both students and teachers.
And then, there comes chrome extensions which are designed to make teachers’ jobs easier and save their time also. If you are a teacher who uses google classroom to organize students, but you still don’t integrate chrome extensions in your teaching activities.
Then this article will help you to introduce some of the great chrome extensions. Once you start to use these extensions, you will experience better and smarter with google classroom. so, let’s get down to business.
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Must try google classroom add ons
When you are using google classroom, you have the option to integrate third party apps and extensions if you find any good ones. There are plenty of add ons you can cover up with google classroom. we have managed a few of them to know you in this regard. However, you can explore more online and get more about this.
Here are 10 must-try google classroom add ons to enhance your entire classroom journey.
Share to classroom is a free classroom extension that is designed to save instructors time, organize all the students on a single page, and allow you to share anything you want with the class easily.
You can push webpages to any of your classes, share content, post assignments, and announcements and it will open instantly on the students’ computers.
Note that the extension should be integrated into both students’ and teachers google classroom. students can also share back web pages and links to the teachers using the extension. But they can’t share materials throughout the entire class.
With the extension installed on your browser, go to the webpage you want to share with the class. You can see the ‘share to classroom’ extension icon on the extension bar of your window. If you can’t see that, you have to pin it to make it visible.
Click on the extension icon and click on pin so that you can see it visible all time. Then you have to click on the ‘push to student’ option to share the webpage with all the active students. You can also attach the webpage to an assignment, question, or announcement.
For teachers, share to classroom includes an option to mute notifications when students share a webpage. To do this, click on the extension icon from the browser window, click settings. Next to Show browser notifications when students push webpages to me, click Turn off.
Mote Voice Commenting
This excellent voice commenting extension will allow teachers to include voice comments to ask questions and also give feedback. It supports all the google education apps like docs, slides, sheets, and classroom.
With Mote voice commenting, you can easily add voice comments and audio content to shared documents, assignments, emails, and forms.
Ask students questions and provide feedback, quickly and with the feeling of human connection. Whether you’re at home or in the classroom, Mote helps educators and students to stay connected.
With the extension installed on your device, open a google docs file or go to the classroom and open an assignment. in google docs, you can add voice comment by clicking on the option ‘Add a comment and in the classroom, add the voice comment in the stream and private comment views.
Students can also leave voice notes, and react to teacher feedback and comments, to let teachers know that they’ve understood and will take action feedback, or that they need more help.
Classwork Zoom
seeing its name, no need to consider this extension related to zoom video conferencing software. it has been designed to accomplish other tasks. with this useful google chrome extension, you are more engaged with the students of your classroom.
Classwork zoom is so effective as it is used to transform classroom activities into a timeline. so, you don’t have to worry about the answer to these questions like,
– Are my students engaged in the work that I’ve assigned?
– Are they managing their time?
– Are they doing their own work in individual assignments?
– Are they contributing evenly enough in group work?
classwork zoom will help to save your time by not going through the revision history of a google doc. as it automatically collects data from the revision history, monetizes and presents it to you as a timeline so that you can easily analyze that.
“The bottom line is that when you can clearly SEE student effort, then you are in a far better position to cultivate it, encourage it, build it, fuel it, nurture it. Let’s say that using Classwork Zoom you discover that your students have a time management problem, always doing their work at the last second. If you then make an attempt to address that problem, you don’t have to just hope or guess that the situation improves, and you don’t have to check your students’ documents one by one to see if your efforts paid off. Just build a timeline for the next assignment and see if their habits are changing.”
Kami
Kami is undoubtedly one of the best classroom extensions which must be installed in your browser. it is actually a PDF editor that is highly used for annotating documents and PDF files.
but you can use it as an all-rounder tool that can help you a lot to manage online classes effectively. For instance, you can transform any document, PDF, image, or other learning resources into an interactive learning environment.
After that, you and the students can collaborate through annotations, video/audio recordings, drawings, and much more. Here are the features of this extension so that you can take full advantage of this.
- Collaborate with your students in real-time whether you’re in-class or teaching remotely
- A wide range of features to engage any style of learner
- Streamline your workflow – assign work, provide feedback, grade all from the same place
- Works with any document, physical or digital
- Integrates with the software you’re already familiar with, such as with Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas
- Split and merge documents with ease
- Detect text on scanned files with built-in OCR
- Enable Kami as your default PDF viewer for quick and accessible annotation
- Wide range of features to boost accessibility for students at any level of learning
However, the extension is available in both free and premium versions. The free version comes with a few basic tools and features that anyone can use almost free. paid version offers some premium features and you have to upgrade the account to get access to them.
Insert Learning
Insert learning is a great option for students and teachers. It comes with great advantages to help teachers and students to create a learning environment anywhere they want. Online is the storehouse of knowledge. It is full of learning platform websites, videos, and resources.
This extension will let you turn any website into a practice field where they can engage interactively. Teachers can insert questions, discussions, and insight directly into any website and share the link in the classroom.
When students open the web page, they can see the added questions, discussions, and insights and can respond. That sounds interesting, isn’t it? Let’s see how it works.
First of all, you have to install the add-on in your browser and make sure the extension is pinned on the extension bar.
now go to the website that you want to use as lesson material, click on the add on icon and you can see six options. each used to take different actions such as assign, highlight, sticky notes, questions, discussions.
Click on the question sign to insert questions in a website article. you can insert video as a learning material through the sticky notes option. if you want to insert a video or some other interactive items, click on the ‘sticky notes’ option and then click on a paragraph.
then insert the youtube video link or any other embed code on that. In this way, you can make online classes more interactive and effective as well.
XODO
XODO is a must have extension for both teachers and students. XODO is a fast and reliable option for PDF readers and editors. It is an all in one integration through which users can read, merge, annotate, sign, and share PDFs and fill in PDF forms.
the interesting side is, with XODO you can insert documents from your computer, Google Drive, and also Dropbox. Here are snippets of this useful extension to realize its benefits.
- Fastest PDF viewing engine and smooth navigation
- All PDF processing is done locally, meaning unlike other apps you don’t have to wait for your PDF to upload to a server
- Write directly on a PDF, highlight and underline text, and more
- Markup, merge and edit documents from your local machine, Google Drive, or Dropbox
- Save edited PDFs to your local machine, Google Drive, or Dropbox
- Annotate PDFs with others in real time
- Fill PDF forms and sign documents
- Compatible with Adobe Acrobat® and other PDF viewers supporting standard PDF annotations
- Available for Android, iOS, Windows, and in any modern browser
- Free – no ads, in-app purchases, or premium tier
to use XODO from now on, install the extension from google extension store and start using it.
Dualless
Dualless is not a classroom asset although it is recommended as it allows you to turn your normal monitor into dual. If you wish for a dual monitor, then this extension is for you.
Besides, while taking online assignments, students need to work with multiple tabs. Whether you are student or teacher, Dualless will help you by splitting your browser windows into two. you can adjust the window ratio according to your needs.
using Dualless, students can split windows, open lesson materials in one portion and google docs files in another one. In this way, students can complete their assignments seamlessly. Here are the features of this excellent extension.
- Split the current browser window into a pair. And resize their position and size according to the ratio specified by the user. (3:7,4:6,5:5,6:4,7:3)
- Merge split browser windows back to a single window, or make it occupy the full-screen area.
- macOS X like windows management. When one of the split windows gets focused, the other in pairs will be shown together. They always occupy the whole screen.
- Pressing the middle key on the split window button will duplicate the current page on other windows.
- Bookmark management. Relaunch your favorite site in a new tab and windows will be split in the recorded ratio.
Apps to integrate with google classroom
Along with these useful add ons, there are some apps you can integrate and enhance your entire classroom experience. There are hundreds of education applications you can integrate with google classrooms.
Those apps are fruitful, provide rich benefits, save teachers time and make it seamless to share information between Classroom and their favorite apps.
you can do a lot of things with a few clicks when you have these apps integrated with google classroom. For instance, here are some of the apps regarding this.
Schoolytics
schoolytics is an awesome app that connects with Google Workspace to analyze Classroom data for students and teachers across your organization. you don’t have to play with additional options to set up schoolytics with your google classroom. you can get started simply by signing in with your Google account.
schoolytics offers different services among them, you can choose any that best fit your needs. their offerings are,
Google Classroom Reporting for Classroom Roster Sync, Classroom Engagement Reports, Google Meet Minutes, Onboarding Support, and PD.
Unified Data Platform for LMS Connector, SIS Connector, Assessments Connector, Data Warehouse, Customizable Dashboards, Equity Reports.
Family Engagement includes Student Portal, Guardian Portal, Homework Reminders, Teacher Conference Materials, Usage Tracking.
studyo
It is a free integration that helps to enhance learning management system activities and do things with flex.
studyo is a complete planner solution for schools, incorporating centralized timetables, workload management, and integration with an LMS as well as google classroom to pull assignments. students can also enter their own tasks or plan all steps of teacher-published tasks together.
Studyo provides benefits in the classroom and beyond by providing your students with the ability to self-manage, take initiative, and problem-solve with confidence.
if you are interested to know about all the available applications you can integrate and take advantage of with google classroom, you can click here to see the whole list. it is managed by Google so you can unworriedly use any of the apps that go with your need.
How to install add ons to google classroom?
We have seen a lot of useful add ons for google classrooms above and you may intend to install them to grasp the benefits right now. however, if you don’t know how to get these add ons, you can follow the instructions here below.
to install add ons, you have to
- open the google chrome browser
- in the above right, you can see the extension icon. Click on that and then click ‘Manage extension’. it will take you to a different window where you can see extensions that you have already installed. if you don’t install any, then there will be no extension on that page. hover over the three line option in the left above and click on ‘Open chrome web store’
- (Alternate to above) you can also do this from the settings option of the browser. Click on settings and you will see the ‘extension’ option in the left menu bar
- when you are on the chrome web store, you can search any extension name and it will instantly appear to you and you can install it to add in your that on your browser.
Finally, the above list of extensions will help you to bring life to your online classes. by integrating add ons to your learning management system, you can go more effectively with all the necessary classroom activities.