10 Must-Have Google Chrome Extensions for Teachers and Students

One of the most exciting things about using the Google Chrome browser in your classroom is the rich ecosystem of extensions. 

These small but powerful enhancements add new layers of functionality, with tools to make any webpage or document interactive, organize your favorite learning resources, elevate your students’ writing, create beautiful math equations, and more. 

All Google Chrome extensions can be found in the Chrome Web Store, and they work on any platform or device that runs Chrome (including Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks). And since they function as an extension of your web browser, you don’t have to worry about making room on your devices for large files. 

We’ve rounded up 10 must-have Google Chrome extensions for teachers and students below. They’re an excellent complement to other classroom technology tools you depend on, but they offer plenty of helpful features on their own. If any of these weren’t on your radar already, you’ll definitely want to give them a look!

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1. Screencastify

Screencastify is a powerful video creation suite featuring a screen recorder that teachers can use to create screencasts, or videos that show what’s on your screen as you narrate (or even as you present from your webcam). With Screencastify, you don’t need specialized, expensive software to record, edit, and share videos. You can do it all, as well as assess student understanding, with our browser extension and start with the click of a button.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Screencastify has all sorts of uses in and outside the classroom, and it’s incredibly useful in the flipped classroom where teachers have to create regular video content for at-home consumption. Use it to quickly create lecture content and tutorials, give and receive student feedback, share student progress with parents, and just about anything else you can imagine. 

Students benefit by being able to watch and re-watch video content at their own pace. You can also incorporate Screencastify into video assignments, helping them develop digital media literacy and presentation skills.

Learn more about the newest features for Screencastify below!

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2. Google Keep

Google Keep is a web clipper that’s kind of like your own private Pinterest board. It’s a digital whiteboard space where you can save just about anything you want to access later (like URLS, text, and images from the web) and have that content sync across devices. You can take notes on content you save, label notes, and more.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Teachers can use Google Keep to stay organized. Breakthroughs and important ideas about new strategies or approaches don’t always occur at ideal times. But with Google Keep, you can jot those ideas down, grab articles, templates, and charts, and keep them organized in a structure, no matter where you are.

Pricing and Offers: Google Keep is completely free to use, with no upsells or premium tiers. It does require a Gmail account, and content stored in Keep uses up some of your Google account’s total storage space.

Get the Google Keep extension.

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3. EquatIO

Math teachers, rejoice! Finally, a simple and straightforward way to create digitized mathematical equations and formulas — even quizzes. Math teachers know the headaches that math typography can bring. EquatIO lets you skip complicated languages like LaTeX and simply create (or use LaTex syntax as needed).

Benefits for Teachers and Students: EquatIO allows math teachers to easily create equations and problems for students to grapple with. Teachers can type, handwrite, or even dictate equations, and EquatIO turns them into properly formatted equations that can be copied into other programs like Word. 

Pricing and Offers: EquatIO is available as a Google Chrome extension, as a standalone Windows and Mac app, and as an integration with different learning management systems (LMS). 

The free version offers quite a lot, but advanced features and integrations (including Google Slides and Sheets and LMS integrations) require a paid site license. Individual teachers can also get a “free for teachers” license with a tool set that lands somewhere between free and premium.

Get the EquatIO extension.

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4. Kami

Kami calls itself a digital classroom tool with a complete assignment workflow. In practice, though, it’s essentially a document markup tool. It can turn a variety of files, like word docs, PDFs, slideshows, and images, into interactive content with live annotations. These annotations can include drawings, audio, and video content.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Using a PDF within your lessons is great in theory. But in practice, there may be a lot of awkward scrolling, zooming in and out, and general fidgeting. And in the end, students are still left staring at a static, silent screen.

With Kami, you can annotate over PDFs and turn them into engaging lessons. Add interactive questions and media to a PDF and make the classroom come alive again.

Pricing and Offers: Kami’s basic extension requires you to create an account but is completely free to use. For more advanced integrations with Google Classroom, Canvas, and Schoology — and to unlock advanced annotation tools like audio and video — you’ll need to upgrade to a $99-per-year teacher plan. Custom plans for schools or entire districts are also available.

Get the Kami extension.

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5. InsertLearning

If Kami lets you mark up and annotate PDFs, InsertLearning does the same thing to actual webpages. This powerful EdTech tool helps you engage learners like never before. You can turn any webpage into a discussion, instruction, or assessment opportunity, inserting engagement questions, videos, sticky notes, and more.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: There’s so much useful content on the web. But turning that content into something thought-provoking or gradable? That can be a challenge. InsertLearning transforms websites into interactive spaces chock full of questions and prompts, helping to increase your students’ lesson comprehension and get them talking.

Pricing and Offers: InsertLearning has a free tier that supports an unlimited number of students but only two concurrent lessons. For $40 per year, an individual teacher can have unlimited lessons and unlimited students. A school-based license includes training for users.

Get the InsertLearning extension.

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6. Grammarly

Grammarly is a Chrome extension and standalone web app that intelligently analyzes any text you write for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and conciseness, all in real-time. 

The premium tier is far smarter than the spelling and grammar checkers in your favorite word processor, and while it’s not foolproof, it can save you (and your students) from embarrassing mistakes and polish your writing.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Grammarly doesn’t just fix mistakes. It teaches users better strategies for writing and helps them sharpen their grammar skills. This is, of course, quite valuable to teachers and students alike.

Pricing and Offers: The basic tier of Grammarly is free to use, both as a Chrome extension and as a web tool. For more clarity and tone insights, word choice suggestions, the plagiarism detector, and more, you’ll want Grammarly Premium for individuals ($12 per month) or Business for multiple educators ($12.50 per user per month). There’s also Grammarly @edu, a solution built for schools and educational institutions.

Get the Grammarly extension.

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7. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid acts as a smart classroom writing assistant. If you’ve tried Grammarly and found it too simple because of your advanced skill level (or your students’), ProWritingAid should be your next step.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: As users write, self-edit, or peer review, they’ll learn to strengthen their reports and stories with precise, engaging language. The built-in plagiarism checker is a big help in vetting student work, too.

Pricing and Offers: ProWritingAid does offer a limited free tier, and you can get a full year of Premium for $79 or a lifetime subscription for $399 (there are also monthly subscription options). Add plagiarism checking for another $10 yearly or $100 lifetime.

Get the ProWritingAid extension.

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8. Pocket

Pocket offers a “capture anything” service that’s very similar to Google Keep. Save anything online (articles, videos, screenshots, and more) to Pocket from the toolbar or with a keyboard shortcut.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Many teachers use Pocket to save, tag, and share educationally valuable articles they discover across the web. Pocket keeps all your exciting finds clean and organized.

Pricing and Offers: Pocket is free, but ad-supported. To ditch the ads and get a permanent library with full-text search, you can get an annual premium membership for $44.99.

Get the Pocket extension.

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9. QR-codegenerator

QR-codegenerator is a handy tool for turning any URL into a QR code without any complicated steps. You can adjust the color and size of the code and even create QR codes from regular text. (Did you know you can also generate QR codes for your videos with Screencastify?)

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Placing a QR code on a printed document that gets sent home can be a great way to get students or parents to exactly the right site or resource with minimal confusion. Of course, this requires that families have the ability to read QR codes (the camera on many smartphones and devices can read them).

Pricing and Offers: QR-codegenerator appears to be a completely free resource with no premium or paid tiers.

Get the QR-codegenerator extension. 

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10. Smallpdf

Adobe lets you read and comment on PDF files for free with its Acrobat Reader app. But if you want to start creating or editing PDFs, rearranging pages, or merging or splitting documents? Then the company wants you to pay a small fortune for Acrobat Pro. Smallpdf lets you do most of that for free, within a handy Chrome extension.

Benefits for Teachers and Students: Teachers can create, edit, split, convert, merge, and compress PDFs without a costly Adobe subscription. So can students, if they need to.

Pricing and Offers: Smallpdf’s free tier gives you 21 powerful editing tools but limits you to two documents per day and includes ads. An unlimited Pro account costs $9 per month, and custom school-wide plans are also available.

Get the Smallpdf extension.

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Start Recording Educational Screencasts With the Free Screencastify Chrome Extension

Screencastify is one of the best Google Chrome extensions for education. Our powerful, easy-to-use tool lets you start creating and sharing videos in seconds. Educators all over the globe are using it to enhance their teaching, both in and out of the classroom.

Ready to get started? Check out what Screencastify can do for teachers like you.