Language Sensei

A Language Teacher's Journey

Cool Tools – My Favourite Browser Extensions, Add-Ons and Docs Extras

| 0 comments

MP900387935We use a lot of tools, apps and other on-line resources in our teaching. I had to work on a browser the other day – which required me to re-enable the add-ons and extensions for it. It got me to thinking about my ‘go to’ tools that I use with both Firefox and Chrome. So I put together a collection of my favourites – probably some of yours as well.

Kaizena – Google Docs: a free tool that you can integrate with your Google Drive account to leave voice comments on the documents that students share with you. With Kaizena authorized to access your Google Drive account you can highlight portions of your students’ work and add voice or text comments to it. Haven’t used it much yet – going to this year.

Texthelp Study Skills – Google Docs: I use Texthelp’s Highlighting Tools to highlight key areas of  student’s documents. I’ve written before about my ‘colour coded feedback‘ – and this allows me to do so online.  You can also collect all the highlighted parts of a document to create a ‘feedback’ page (by color or location) for a student  to review. Love it!

Rikaichan- Chrome/Firefox: This could be a GAME CHANGER for my classes in working with authentic resources. I’ve written about the challenges of teaching a character-based language in the past. Then I discovered this Rikaichan add-on that allows a student to ‘hover’ over the Chinese characters Japanese uses – and get both the way to say the word – and a general translation of it. Oh My Goodness – Equality of Access! Works with Japanese to English/German/French/Russian dictionary. Don’t forget to download the necessary dictionaries for the add-on to work with the languages you want!

Tweetdeck – Chrome (Twitter): Following a Twitter chat like #langchat can be a challenge. Tweetdeck  (a Twitter product) works with Chrome and is a social media ‘dashboard’. Essentially it allows me to customize my view of Twitter. I have a column for an individual hashtag, another for specific references to me all at the same time. It makes it easy to focus on that one hashtag and quickly respond to comments/questions to me personally. I couldn’t do #langchat without it! Edublogs offers a short primer on it here.

Evernote Webclipper- Chrome/Firefox: I’ve blogged a lot before about my shift to using Evernote to curate my teaching life. One of the most indispensable tools for me is the Evernote Web Clipper. It allows me to send full articles, parts of hte article or just the URL right to my Evernote account. More importantly it sends it to the notebook I want – and allows me to “tag” it before I send it – and for me ‘tagging‘ means I’ll actually find the article again.

KeepVid – Chrome/Firefox: Ever had a great clip you want to show from YouTube or another source and  – bam – the internet goes down in your class. Or its slow….and keeps buffering. If a video clip is key to my teaching I have to be able to use it without relying on the speed or availability of the web. I’ve used a couple of methods and KeepVid Video Downloader is a pretty reliable one. It is a free web application that allows you to download from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo,etc.  All you need is the URL of the page that has the video you want to download.

Clea.nr Videos – Chrome (YouTube): Sometimes I do show a YouTube clip in class – and stream it. At that point I just want to show the clip – and not worry about any questionable ads or other ‘sidebar’ issues. So I use Cleanr is a browser extension that strips out the ads, sidebars, comments, buttons etc from YouTube videos. If I haven’t downloaded the video to keep for future reference – then this is the way to ensure that the video is all that I’m showing!

Hola Unblocker – Chrome/Firefox: US-based colleagues won’t understand but frequently clips/streaming from BBC, Hula, Pandora and  other networks are blocked by region locks and unavailable to me in Canada.  Well I can – using Hola Unblocker – a browser extension that removes region locks and allows you to watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix, Hula, Pandora, and more regardless of where you live. They try to get you to pay at some point – but works for free (and lets me watch “Downton Abbey” way before we get it here in North America!)

There are a lot more add-ons, extensions and web tools out there – I haven’t even mentioned Diigo which I am starting to work with either! What are your favourites?

Colleen

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.


Skip to toolbar