Chrome Extensions For Teachers

I know there are hundreds of great chrome extensions, and for a more exhaustive list check out my friend JR Ginex-Orinion and his Chromando Training Site. These are five I use all the time.

Awesome Screenshot: 
Awesome screenshot icon
In the posts below this one you might notice I have some really long screenshots of google forms and my classroom charts blog. I got those with Awesome Screenshot because you can capture an entire web page. You can also blur out personal information, and annotate the screenshots with arrows. You can save them directly to Google Drive too. Get Awesome Screenshot

Clipboard History:
This extension saves a copy of the last ten things you copied. This comes in handy if you do a lot of moving information around. Mine is full of URL's, email addresses and, even a form letter I was sending to groups of my graduate students. The sample below gives you an idea. Just click the eyeball next to a clip to see it again and recopy it. Get Clipboard History
ShortenMe:
I often need to email links or share them with students. I like to use Goo.gl to make them shorter, but ShortenMe makes the process much faster. Instead of copying the URL, going to Goo.gl, pasting it in and clicking shorten; I just hit the shorten me icon in my browser and it automatically makes a short link for the page I am on and copies it to my clipboard. (Which also puts it in my clipboard history.) All I have to do is paste it into the email or blog post I am writing. Also, because it uses Goo.gl I can always visit the Goo.gl page to see how many times the short link has been used. Get ShortenMe

Clearly:
Like many teachers, I find lots of things online for my students to read, but some of that text comes with a lot of distractions. Also, a lot of the time I want to move the text into a Google Doc to combine it with a graphic organizer and share it with my students privately. Clearly removes the distractions and even lets me easily save the article to Evernote. Plus the icon is so cute. 
Color Picker:
I like it when things match. You probably didn't notice, but the dark blue of the title box on this blog matches the dark blue of the mountains in the picture. That did not happen by accident. I used color picker to quickly grab the code number for the color blue I wanted and then customized the blog header
to match. It also comes in handy for making colors coordinate in presentations. And I used to to make the colors of my classroom blog match our school colors.


And More:
I'm sure I've probably left off your favorite extension. The best part of writing this post is you will all probably tell me about cool extensions I may want to try. Add them in the comments below.

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