1. Mercury Reader
Reading an article on a website riddled with banners, ads, recommendations, and widgets can be highly distracting. It can slow down your research and make it hard to focus on what matters. The Mercury Reader is one of the best tools to clean up a website of all unnecessary content. To clear an article of all the unnecessary clutter, simply tap on the Rocket icon in the upper-right corner of the display to get a clean reading experience. The extension also enables users to send the article to their Kindle with a tap, as well as adjust text size, typography and switch to a dark theme.
2. Strict Workflow
It’s quite easy for students to get distracted and waste precious hours on social media and other sites. If this applies to you, then you may want to consider getting Strict Workflow. The extension employs the so-called “Pomodoro technique” which forces you to work for 25 minutes in exchange for a five-minute break. During work sessions, you won’t be allowed to access distracting websites. Strict Workflow already comes with a default block list, which includes sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and others. Users can add their other sites to the list, but only during breaks and not working sessions. The only way to get out to work or break mode is to disable the extension.
3. Memorize!
Memorize! allows you to do whatever you like on the Internet and memorize your homework at the same time. Students can use it to create questions and answers that the extension will ask at predefined intervals. A browser notification will halt whatever you are doing and ask for the answer to the question. Each wrong answer will reveal a single character of the answer until you give the full correct answer. The asking frequency can be defined by the users, and there’s also the option to “Cancel” the question if you are in the middle of something that can’t be put off.
4. Note Board – Sticky Notes App
Note-taking is very important for anyone looking to be productive, and it especially holds true for students, as they have a lot of data they need to store and remember. Note Board is an extension that sets up boards in your browser where you can pin notes. You can create multiple boards with different purposes and add as many notes as you wish. It packs a whole range of customization options with a complete editor for creating your entries. Some of its features include the ability to set reminders, create connections between notes, add media files, draw, a cloud backup, various board themes, and many others.
5. Google Dictionary
This is a must-have extension for every student, as it helps with expanding vocabulary. Google Dictionary shows the meaning of words on any web page just by double-clicking on them. It will display the definition in a bubble above the word. Furthermore, students can click on the “More” button to open the complete definition and also get access to synonyms, translation, sentence usage, origin, and more.
6. Screencastify
The Screencastify extension allows users to create short five-minute videos by recording their screen, face and voice. Videos are then stored in Google Drive and can be edited using Screencastify’s own tools. These can be found by clicking on the extension in the right corner of the display in Chrome.
7. Voice In Voice Typing
Voice typing can come in handy for students. With the VoiceIin Voice Typing extension, they can start doing so right away. Once it’s installed, Voice In will ask you to select the language you want to dictate in and grant microphone permission, so you can start dictating. Next, you can go ahead and try the feature out using the Voice In Test Pad or an app of your choice. The extension works with popular services like Gmail, Outlook, WordPress, Google Search, Zendesk and many others. Overall results are good, but students will still have to double-check the results and perhaps add punctuation.
8. Auto Highlight
Auto Highlight is a productivity extension that helps students go over large materials in a short period of time. Once activated, the tool searches the texts and highlights the most important paragraphs using an algorithm that picks major sentences based on term frequencies in the entire article. Depending on the length of the materials, users may have to click on the extension more than once to get additional paragraphs highlighted. Naturally, this extension won’t help you acquire an in-depth view of the article, but if you’re just trying to decide whether the piece has information you could use for your work, it’s quite a useful tool to have.
9. My Study Life
We’ve left this one for last because it’s an app rather than an extension. Nevertheless, it works in quite the similar fashion. My Study Life is a to-do and schedule manager Chrome app specifically created for students and teachers. You can use this app to create a complete schedule of classes, tests, and assignments. Once all the data has been added, My Study Life will give you a complete overview of your schedule and notify you of any upcoming assignments, classes or due dates. My Study Life also lets you save assignments in its cloud storage so that students can access it from anywhere. The service also has a dedicated Android app. The above tools should help you become more productive while researching and working on your class projects. If you wish to continue tapping into Chrome’s vast library of extensions, perhaps you should continue reading about the best extensions that can speed up your browsing or automate boring browsing tasks.
