As a teacher, you naturally want to give your students the best virtual experience while ensuring that your workload is manageable. With virtual lessons being the new normal, every teacher needs these top 14 Google Classroom extensions to make their lives a little easier.
While there are numerous Google Classroom extensions for teachers, the following extensions are definite must-have extensions for teachers: Bitmoji, Kami, Classwork Zoom, Google Keep, Google Calendar, Share to Classroom, Random Student Generator for Google Classroom, Custom Cursor, Turn Off the Lights, Mote, Pocket, Nightshift, InsertLearning, and Dualless.
These 14 Google Classroom extensions will help you engage with your students, lighten your workload and make your life as a teacher a bit more bearable.
Where To Find The Tools Below
All of the tools below can be installed as google chrome extensions and you can fine them by clicking on the link below and typing their name into the search.
LINK: Google Chrome Extensions Search
Bitmoji
Bitmoji allows you to create an avatar of yourself as a sticker and post your Bitmoji stickers anywhere you want. With this extension, you’ll be able to insert your Bitmoji into Google Slides, Gmail, virtual assignments or anywhere on the web.
Creating a Bitmoji for yourself and having your students create Bitmoji’s for themselves is a great way to create a space for fun communication and freedom of expression in the classroom.
Kami
Kami allows you to upload PDF files from your Google Drive or desktop and annotate these documents with a virtual pen, highlighter or marker. Kami also provides a blank PDF that can be used as a virtual whiteboard.
This extension is particularly useful for teachers who would like to grade students’ assessments as you would if they were on paper. Kami offers a grading feature that allows teachers to give feedback in the form of video and audio annotations while also offering the option to place text or shapes anywhere on the page.
This extension is also useful because it allows students to annotate and draw freely with a selection of markers, colors, shapes and text sizes.
Overall, Kami is a great opportunity to restore a sense of normality to the classroom environment, despite giving virtual lessons.
Classwork Zoom
Classwork Zoom enables you to monitor and manage your students’ productivity on various Google products, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. The extension also compiles all the document’s revision history and puts it in one place, saving you from having to open each document and scroll through the revision history.
Classwork Zoom is particularly helpful in detecting plagiarism. This extension identifies when a student has pasted a large amount of text into a document, consequently helping you keep an eye out for any potential plagiarism issues.
Additionally, this extension will help you easily identify any student who may be struggling with the work, and note each student’s contribution to group work, enabling you to meet each student’s needs and assist with classroom management.
Google Keep
The Google Keep extension is a convenient, efficient note-taking service. Google Keep allows you to save quotes, images, or webpages and then take notes on the document you saved through audio or text.
Additionally, Google Keep allows you to create extensive checklists and color-code your notes saved on Google Keep. This extension is particularly convenient because it will enable you to access these notes on any device that you are signed into through Google.
Google Calendar
The Google Calendar extension provides you with quick and easy access to the day’s events. This extension will create a button on your browser toolbar that will enable you to click on the button and see the day’s events without even having to leave the page you’re on.
This extension provides an effective way for you to quickly look and see what you have upcoming for the day while being present in your lesson.
Share to Classroom
The Share to Classroom extension enables you to present whatever web page you’re looking at directly onto your students’ screens through Google Classroom.
This extension is very convenient in ensuring that your students are all looking at the correct page and saves them from going to look for the page, consequently saving time.
Random Student Generator for Google Classroom
Getting students to actively participate in virtual lessons can be quite a challenge. The Random Student Generator for Google Classroom uses your Google Classroom roster to randomly select students to answer questions.
This extension is a great tool to get students to participate without feeling like their teacher is picking on them when they’re called to answer a question.
Custom Cursor
Bringing a sense of fun into a virtual classroom while maintaining a constructive learning environment can be a bit of a challenge. Custom Cursor offers a range of different fun-themed cursors that you can choose from.
To make things even more exciting, consider allowing a student to pick the cursor for the lesson. This is a fun way to get students to follow during the lesson and look forward to the following lesson.
Turn Off the Lights
The Turn Off the Lights extension has been designed to help students focus while a video is being presented on screen. This extension dims everything on the screen surrounding the video. This enables the student to simply focus on the video that is playing, rather than being distracted by the surrounding lights on the screen.
This extension is effective in helping students remain engaged and will be especially useful to students with learning disabilities, consequently making your virtual classroom a more inclusive space.
Mote
Mote is an extension that enables you to easily add transcribed voice notes and provide feedback to assignments and shared documents. This extension can be especially useful when grading papers as it allows you to easily give feedback while saving you time.
With Mote Voice Commenting, you are able to add transcribed voice comments. This extension is particularly helpful because it supports transcription in 15 different languages, which can be of great assistance to students whose first language is not English.
Pocket is an extension that enables you to save websites, articles or videos that you want to revisit at a later stage.
With this extension, you’ll simply have to click on the extension whenever you find something you want to revisit at a later stage, and Pocket will save it for you. This extension is a wonderful way to keep track of resources in an organized manner.
Nightshift
Virtual teaching, along with the screen time required to prepare lessons can be quite harmful to your eyes in the long run. The Nightshift extension protects your eyes while teaching your online class by shifting your screen colors to the warmer side.
This extension also offers a timer that allows you to only activate the extension at certain times and also allows you to customize the level of warmth you would like on your screen.
InsertLearning
InsertLearning is an extension designed to make virtual lessons more interactive while saving teachers time and effort.
With the InsertLearning extension, you will be able to insert questions, comments or conduct discussions on any website. Your students will then be able to access the website, respond to the questions, partake in the discussion, and make their own notes.
Dualless
The Dualless extension allows you to split your screen into two, enabling you to present one window to your class while simultaneously viewing your students on the other side of your screen.
This extension also allows you to determine the size of your split-screen to suit your preference. This way, if you’d like to keep an eye on the students, you could make the side of the screen that displays your students larger than the other side. This would be beneficial in giving you the ability to monitor your students while teaching as you would when teaching in person.
Conclusion
For many teachers, having to adapt to virtual lessons has been quite a challenge. However, with these 14 Google Classroom extensions, both teachers and students will be able to create a constructive virtual classroom environment and effectively engage with one another.
