7 Chrome Extensions That Made The Coordinator’s Job Easy

Introduction

As an MYP coordinator, I always work to be more effective and productive to balance my teaching and coordination responsibilities. New tools and resources become available every day and can be challenging to keep up with. I’ve compiled a list of 7 Chrome extensions I use daily to increase my productivity. These are just a few of my favorites.

Print Friendly & PDF

Part of the MYP Coordinator’s responsibilities is to keep track of IB curriculum updates, and we provide teachers with access to reading materials to help them stay informed. Print-Friendly & PDF chrome extension allows me to take any webpage I want and create a printer-friendly version or download it as a PDF file to share with teachers. It’s great when I want to print out an article to share with teachers to read and discuss without the extraneous parts that I might not want to include, such as ads and commercials. You won’t have to worry about wasting any paper with this! I can email the document without the extra pop-ups and the advertisements on the page. It also consists of the URL of the article from which the material originated.

Scribe

The MYP coordinator is often charged with writing step-by-step instructions, creating manuals, and the like. Taking screenshots to illustrate steps or creating a tutorial video requires much time. Using Scribe, we can generate documentation about our processes and workflows, sharing this documentation with others. This saves us a lot of time and enables us to share information easily with teachers, students, and parents. I briefly introduced Scribe in my previous blog post. I highly recommend it! You can sign up for this service here (affiliate link) if you’re interested. Educators can get 50% off the pro plan. just need to sign up for Scribe (free version) and write into support via support@scribehow.com..

Text Blaze

The Text Blaze extension lets you easily insert pre-created texts to make writing emails and providing feedback quicker. You can quickly type text into the posts by utilizing a series of keyboard shortcuts. It will eliminate the trouble of copying and pasting, or of having to keep typing the same messages. It works on Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, or anywhere else you write in Chrome. Even the free version is pretty robust. The video demonstrates how it operates.

Bitly

The URL-shortening tool Bitly takes a link that contains a string of numerals, symbols, and capital letters and shortens it to make it more easily consumed. It’s a must-have for anyone who shares links with others or sends them via email. It lowers cognitive load when providing information and reduces mental fatigue. For even better statistics, use Bitly to find out how many people are clicking the link and which type of information interests them the most. This information is useful when trying to get parents involved and figuring out what topics they care about. When you want to shorten URLs in Chrome, you can do so with the Bitly extension without leaving your browser.

Bookable Schedule by Boomerang

Have you ever sent emails back and forth trying to figure out a mutually agreeable time to get together? To save time from emailing back and forth, you can indicate your availability through Bookable Schedule and then insert it into your email to share with students, colleagues, and parents. They can look at their calendars and book an appointment without exchanging extra messages. With this add-on, you’ll automatically be able to create a Google Meet link, which will work even if you can’t meet in person. No more scheduling conflicts! To activate Bookable Schedule to your Gmail, you will need to install the Boomerang for Gmail Chrome extension.

Blackbox – Select. Copy. Paste & Search

With Blackbox, you can edit text and selectable items from youtube videos, pictures, webpages, and other sources all from your browser! I found this really helpful when I tried to duplicate the spreadsheet formula or app script shown in a youtube tutorial video.

MyBib

We can only ask students to demonstrate academic honesty if teachers also model that behavior. I carefully cite my sources when researching or utilizing other people’s data. Using MyBib is an easy, free way to get bibliographic information and in-text citations. The formatting can be changed to match different citation styles, and projects can be set up to save links as they are found. I also show students how to use MyBib for their research when planning their personal projects.

Conclusion

There are many other great extensions out there as well. What are some of your favorite extensions? If you have any suggestions or recommendations, please share them in the comments below!