Boosting Teacher Productivity with Chrome Extensions

In today's digital age, teachers are constantly looking for ways to enhance their productivity and streamline their workflow. Fortunately, Chrome extensions offer a plethora of tools and features designed to make teaching more efficient and effective. These extensions can help you as a teacher organize tasks, collaborate with colleagues, and engage students in the classroom. Let’s explore some of my top Chrome extension recommendations to enhance your daily productivity.

Add to Google Classroom:

Google Classroom is an indispensable tool for teachers, and the corresponding Chrome extension takes its functionality to the next level. With this extension, teachers can quickly take the page they are viewing and share it to a Google Classroom. It eliminates the need to navigate through multiple windows, copying and pasting, and allowing teachers to save precious time.

Grammarly:

Good communication is crucial for teachers, whether it's preparing lesson plans, grading assignments, or providing feedback. Grammarly, a widely popular Chrome extension, helps teachers ensure their writing is clear, concise, and error-free. It automatically detects grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, making it an invaluable tool for enhancing the quality of written communication.

OneTab:

Teachers often find themselves overwhelmed with multiple tabs open simultaneously while conducting research or preparing lesson materials. OneTab is a simple yet effective Chrome extension that allows users to consolidate all their open tabs into a single tab with clickable links. This not only saves system resources but also provides a clutter-free browsing experience, enabling teachers to stay focused and organized.

Evernote Web Clipper:

Evernote Web Clipper empowers teachers to capture and save online content seamlessly. Whether it's articles, research papers, or useful teaching resources, this extension allows teachers to clip web pages and annotate them directly. It also enables teachers to organize their clips into different notebooks, facilitating easy access and retrieval of valuable information.

Kami:

Kami is an exceptional Chrome extension for teachers who work with digital documents, such as PDFs. With Kami, teachers can annotate, highlight, and comment on PDF files directly in their browser. This extension facilitates collaborative assignments, document sharing with students, and the paperless distribution of assignments, eliminating the need for physical copies.

Screencastify:

Creating instructional videos and tutorials is an effective way for teachers to engage their students. Screencastify is a user-friendly Chrome extension that allows teachers to record their screens, webcam, or both simultaneously. Teachers can use this extension to create video lessons, explain complex concepts, or provide step-by-step instructions, ultimately enhancing student comprehension and saving valuable classroom time.

Giphy:

Have fun with graphics and Giphy. Teachers can use the Giphy Chrome extension to add funny, moving images and even stickers to slideshows. Easily download, save them to your computer, or drag and drop them into your Google Slideshow for engagement and aesthetics.

In the fast-paced world of education, teacher productivity is of paramount importance. Chrome extensions provide a wealth of tools and features that can significantly enhance teacher efficiency and streamline their daily tasks. By incorporating these extensions into your workflow, teachers can optimize productivity, save time, and ultimately provide a more enriching educational experience for their students.

Green Screens and Empathy in Social Studies Class

Teaching empathy is one of the key social emotional skills to help students build relationships with other students and adults. A really unique way to do this is through the use of green screens in the Social Studies classroom. Exploring topics in history has always been a great way to build empathy, but by incorporating a green screen, students can quite literally place themselves in the shoes of a historical figure.

If you aren't familiar with green screen technology (also known as chroma key), it can be a simple and inexpensive activity for your class. The three basic steps are: take photos in front of a green background, digitally remove the green background, and digitally replace it with anything. There are extensive green screen kits for purchase online, but you can grab a green table cloth from any dollar store and use your cell phone to try it out. I'm a firm believer of using what you have before you invest.

Green screens are a fun technology integration activity for your classroom, but when creating this activity for your students there are a few things to consider. The goals of the lesson should be focused on the learning and not on the technology. Technology simply adds an element of engagement, fun or new skills to support the ultimate goals. When designing the lesson, it is important to keep that in mind as it is easy to get carried away with the fun of a green screen. Green screens are great, but what are the students learning? Always start with your learning objective and build the activity from there.

For example, the objectives might include things like:

-compare and contrast historical experience and modern day experience

-build empathy capacity in students through connecting with historical events

-narrate historical events

-support claims with evidence from primary sources

Last year I coached a teacher through the process and our goal was to help students build a capacity for empathy through writing about the experiences of soldiers in the Civil War. We designed a two part activity in which the students would recreate Civil War photos using the green screen, and then use a RAFT writing template to develop a letter home from the perspective of someone in the image. The teacher that I was working with chose about 10 Civil War photos from the Library of Congress to have the students recreate. As a class, they looked at each of the pictures and heard about the background information for each one. They formed groups to chose which picture they would re-create. Using a green screen, students took their pictures, uploaded them to Google Drive and edited them using a web tool and Google Drawings.

The picture taking, uploading and editing process can take a bit of time depending on the skills of your students. The teacher and I also created a slideshow of the step-by-step process to edit the images. This was really helpful for students to follow along if they were new to photo editing. Some students worked in pairs to have the directions up on one screen and the photo editing on another computer. Some didn't even need to use the directions at all!

Again, the most important part of this lesson wasn't to utilize a green screen, but to allow students to empathize with the soldiers in the Civil War. Incorporating a writing piece helped to meet that goal while having fun. Keeping in mind the true objectives of the lesson will help you design something that integrates technology effectively and meets your content goals at the same time.

Resource: How to Create Green Screen Photos with Google

Reflections on the #NYC19 Google Innovator Academy

The Google Innovator Academy is a magical place. It's due in part to the culture of Google, attitude of innovation, and the friends that become family. I had thought it would be an amazing experience to be an Innovator when I first heard about the Google badges back in 2010, but I never really thought I would have the chance to attend. I decided to apply this year after finishing graduate school and looking for a way to continue pushing myself into new ways of thinking. That, coupled with the fact that I think my colleagues were tired of me saying "I have an idea!" This would give me an opportunity to share that outside of our tiny basement office.

Applying was a bit of an undertaking. I wasn't really sure what I was doing so I tuned into all of the YouTube live streams before the application was due to make sure I was on the right track. My introvert heart was panicked at the video creation, but with some help I was able to get it done. After more takes than I'd like to admit. After submission, the wait was relatively short, only two weeks, but the last day of waiting for the email for acceptance or trying again was agonizing. Around 8:45 pm, I got an email that I wasn't accepted. I was ready to go back to the drawing board and consider what I could change for 2020. But then, about two weeks later I was sitting at EdCamp Jersey Shore and I got an email and Twitter DM that someone had dropped out of the Academy and I was next on the list and now accepted. I was shocked and excited, but feeling a bit like an outsider like I got in on a technicality.

I learned a short time later that this is called "impostor syndrome" and we started talking about it right away in the 50 person hangout chat that I became a member of with the rest of the cohort. We dug into this more at the academy, and I discovered almost everyone felt this at some point on their way and then at the academy. However, recognizing our feelings and going through it together helped. After all, I knew that hundreds of people applied multiple times and even to be considered was such an honor, even if I was the first runner up.

The academy was a whirlwind. We built friendships, we built weird chairs, we laughed, and we cried (no I'm not exaggerating). We toured amazing spaces like YouTube, micro-kitchens, the 14th floor, the cafes, and the balcony decks with breathtaking views of New York City. There are however, a few reflections that I think I'll always want to remember about this experience: celebrate failure, don't be afraid to pivot and you don't have to solve the world's problems alone.

1. Celebrate failures. At the academy we had a fail bell that we could ring when we failed. When rung, everyone would clap and cheer wildly for you. The bell was a symbol that you were trying or your “first attempt in learning,” if you will. The bell also demonstrated that you were reflecting and not giving up. Many of us, including me, are afraid to fail. If I’m being honest, it’s one of my greatest fears. But truly our biggest critics are ourselves. Recognizing that it’s ok to admit failure and continue to move forward should be celebrated. The bell reminded me that it's important to support your friends and colleagues when they fail and be kind to yourself too.

2. Don’t be afraid to pivot. I went to the academy with a deep problem focusing around professional learning. Before the academy the team (known as "lightbulb" in our chat) was adamant we didn’t come to the academy with a solution in mind. They said it would make us more open to “moonshot” thinking and solutions we never dreamed of being possible. Well, on the night of day 2 that’s just what happened. Through conversation with a few friends we were deep in philosophical mud of our challenges and started coming up with a plan. All of a sudden our project shifted focus. We feverishly tried to note down all the crazy stuff we just came up with and told my wonderful coach and fellow Jesery Girl, Christine Lion-Bailey, who announced “I think we have a pivot!” The coaches cheered loudly and urged us to go for it. With my new partner, our project started to take shape as a 90 degree turn from our original plan. We could’ve never come up with our idea without the constant reminder to keep pushing our thinking further.

3. You don’t have to solve the world’s problems alone. One of the greatest things that came out of this crazy talk is my partnership with fellow cohort member Caitlin. The more we continued to dig into our problem, the more we realized that our own unique talents can work together to reach our goals. The whole cohort of #nyc19 was the most supportive group of “like minded wackos” I’ve ever met. After this experience, I feel like everyone needs a chance to find their own group of wackos. It’s important and necessary in education (and probably most other professions) to remember you aren’t alone. You’re trying to solve problems together for the future generations of teachers and students. It’s a big job and you don’t have to do it alone. The academy taught me you have to seek out your own group of like minded wackos and lean on them when you need support, friendship, help, and to know you aren’t the only one trying to change the world, but together you just might be crazy enough to do it.