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Friday, April 1, 2016

Challenge: Chromebook Apps and Extensions

So, today I decided to work on this challenge. For me, I have already integrated quite a few of these into my computer usage, as I primarily use Chrome as a browser and like poking around and seeing what I can come up with that are helpful. There are quite a few add-ons for the different tools in Google Drive that are awesome, on top of the extensions and applications. I always find these to be fairly helpful and useful as I go through life, since it provides a central hub for everything. It could be concerning to some since everything is centrally located, but I do like it.

Application: Kindle Cloud Reader
Rating: 3/5

I have a Kindle Paperwhite, so that has facilitated my use of Amazon products predominately for my digital book needs. I really enjoy a lot of the features Amazon offers, but I do feel like the Cloud Reader has some limitations. I'm going to touch on those first.
Amazon allows you to create collections, which are really handy for me, seeing that I can group books into as many of those as I would like. It helps for organization, as I have a large number of ebooks with Amazon (No, I don't plan on disclosing just how many I have). Unfortunately, Cloud Reader doesn't allow use of these collections. It is somewhat frustrating to have to utilize another device or platform to sort my read books.
On the positive side, I do like that I can use both the title list and the cover means of looking through my books. Being visual, it helps to find the book I want. Also, I like the features associated with the Amazon platform for the ebooks, including the ability to share or loan out books. This is something I plan on having available to students in the future. They can, with parent permission, create an Amazon account and receive books to read digitally. This is in part why I have so many books, as I have been collecting ebooks to share with my students.
The features that support learning, such as highlighting, definition look ups, and taking notes. These can be exported to their own documents. There isn't as much of the language support as is available through other Amazon platforms, but there are supports present within Kindle Cloud Reader.
Side note: I utilize BookBub as my means for collecting ebooks through Amazon. This website sends you an email every day of your desired genres of books that are free and reduced on your chosen platform. Amazon seems to provide the largest number of free and reduced books, but there are other supported platforms.

Extension: OneTab
Rating: 4.5/5

This extension is awesome. I love it. It condenses all of your tabs you have open (and let's be honest, we have all done this at one time or another) into one page where you can store them or reaccess them at a later date. The page it provides after shrinking your tabs allows for you to look at previous saved sets, as well as rearrange listed links to different groupings. There is also the ability to add tabs one at a time to the main page, which is helpful when you have some windows you prefer to leave open all the time.
This would be a great tool for research, as students doing online research can maintain their list of digital sources until the end of their projects. They can then return as needed, rather than losing their sources.
Additionally, students in the one to one program are presented with computers that may not have adequate processing power for a large amount of tabs running at any given time. This extension would allow them to condense their tabs to a reasonable number and return to the tabs at a later time.


1 comment:

  1. Thank you for providing such great feedback on these two tools. I will have to check out the One Tab extension to see how it works.

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