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5 Crafty Extensions Chrome Extensions That Will Improve Your Teaching

Crafty's Extensions are AMAZING digital tools for all classroom teachers. These Chrome extensions will help improve your productivity and efficiency during any lesson. If you are not familiar with Chrome extensions, check out THIS post of mine on the collaborative Technology Tools for Teachers blog.

5 Crafty Chrome Extensions That Will Improve Your Teaching. Use on laptops or Chromebooks: Technology in the Classroom

Crafty Chrome Extension #1

CraftyText allows you to display text across any webpage and appears in LARGE font. You can see in the image below that I wanted students to go to the website code.org. Instead of exiting out of the website I was on or having to open a new file to display the website, I was able to project the url within seconds. I just clicked the Crafty Text icon, typed in the web address, pressed enter/return and it projected across my screen. Students in the back of the room could easily see what they needed to type in without me having to repeat it out loud 1,000 times. Elementary teachers...you KNOW what I am talking about šŸ˜œ

Project websites, vocabulary words, math equations, names, sentences, anything!


Crafty Chrome Extension #2

CraftyCursor brings attention to your cursor when you are demonstrating where students need to click on their computers. My favorite part is that you can change up the colors.



Simply click on the extension's icon, choose your color and click "Start Highlighting". You can highlight text on a webpage and your cursor will be highlighted in the color you choose. When you click you will see the cursor POP with a red flash:


Crafty Chrome Extension #3

CraftyLevel shows you the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of any web page you visit. Highlight the text on the page and click the CraftyLevel extension. The reading level will appear on the extension icon. As you can see below, this National Geographic for Kids website is close to a 6th grade reading level.


Crafty Chrome Extension #4

CraftyRights forces Google image searches to only return results labeled for reuse. Although the extension can't make guarantees, this is still a good option for students to use when completing digital projects. The extension claims that if you plan to modify or use the image for commercial use then you should consider selecting a different license.


Crafty Chrome Extension #5

CraftyZoom allows you to zoom in or magnify a part of any webpage. Simply click on the extension's icon and press AMD-SHIFT-Z or CTRL-SHIFT-Z and click on the part of the screen you would like to magnify. This really comes in handy when you are trying to show students small items/icon to click and using this extension provides a hard to miss visual cue.


If you are a fan of Crafty extensions like me, then you might be interested in checking out their newest extension, CraftyCopy. This extension makes is easy to export a list of your current extensions and then import that list on a new account and easily install them.

I am still undecided about which one is my favorite. I use CraftyText the most; however, I think CraftyCursor is just as brilliant! Which one is your favorite?

Update!
I have received lots of feedback and a few questions since I wrote this post. So I put together a quick video tutorial to show you how these extensions work. Enjoy!


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