Alternatives for the Clearly Chrome extension

Bad news: Clearly is going away.

For years one of my favorite Chrome extensions has been Clearly from Evernote. It is a simple extension that does an awesome thing. When you click the Clearly extension it cleans up the web page you are reading by removing ads, comments, backgrounds, and all other distracting images and elements, leaving only the core content of the page in an easy to read format. The extension is especially useful for students to help them focus on what they are reading when websites can be full of so many distractions.

Unfortunately it is being discontinued.

Evernote announced on their blog that as of January 22, 2016 they will no longer be supporting or offering Clearly. If you already have it installed, it may still keep working for now, but without any more updates it may stop functioning overtime. If you do not have it installed, it will no longer be available in the Chrome Web Store. For more details see Evernote's blog post.

So what alternatives are the for Clearly? Thankfully there are other Chrome extensions that perform a similar function. Below we will take a look at four options to consider for you and your students. Watch the video to see each one demonstrated and see the rest of the post below for a quick overview of each with links to install them.

Addressing student cheating in Google Apps

Modern technology provides schools with amazing options for the "4 C's" - Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, and Critical thinking.

Unfortunately it also provides new opportunities for a fifth "C" - Cheating.

21st century technology gives students new ways to plagiarize or share work. As more and more schools embrace technology, Google Apps, Chromebooks, and more, what are we to do to address the issues of academic integrity?

I recently recorded a one-hour webinar on this topic. In the video training we take a look at cheating as well as possible options to help address the issue. These include non-technology options, as well as technology tools and resources that can help prevent or investigate cheating.

You can watch the video below, access the linked resources for the session, and read an abbreviated overview of the webinar content in the rest of the blog post:

6 awesome uses for Revision History

When I first started teaching (way back in BG - Before Google) when you graded a student’s paper, all you had to go on was the final paper itself. What you saw on the page was what you had to work with.

However, with Google Apps that is not the case. Google provides you with your own personal time machine in a tool called Revision History, which lets you see every change ever made to a document, when the change was made, and who made the change. This powerful tool is available in Google Documents, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings.

So how can teachers use Revision History to improve teaching and learning? See below for an overview of how the tool works, followed by six awesome ideas on how you can put this to use in your classroom.

Adding Integers with Google Drawings

The concept of negative numbers can be a challenge for students to grasp. We usually address this by trying to model positive and negatives with something more physical or concrete. Common illustrations involve number lines, temperature, elevation, or electrical charges. I even used balloons and bow ties when I was a middle school math teachers (maybe I’ll need to explain that one in a future post).

One of the more effective methods to demonstrate adding positive and negative numbers involved using semi-transparent colored plastic chips on an overhead projector (younger folks can ask a seasoned educator about this once ubiquitous device). Blue chips represented positive numbers, while yellow chips stood for negatives. When you added a positive number with a negative number you would put the chips on the overhead projector and then pair up the positives with the negatives by placing the blue chips on top of the yellow chips. Since they were see through, a blue chip and a yellow chip would look green, which indicated the positive and negative cancelling each other out. Whichever color had chips left over would be added up to give the final answers to the addition problem.

New Version of Google Sheets

I recently came across a top secret screen capture (shown on the right) of what I believe must be the new version of Google Sheets.

Although you can't tell too much from the picture, one thing is clear... the new version of Sheets is em-bed-dable.

Feel free to leave your best pun in the comments below.

Turn your old computers into Chromebooks

After more than two decades in education, one thing I know for sure is that schools hold on to old things. With tight budgets we have to be careful to make things last, sometimes well beyond their normal lifespan. This is especially true for computers which should have a healthy life span of five years, but many schools keep them going twice as long.

When the computers are older than the students, problems can arise:

• The computer gets slower and slower with each year and each program installed over those years.
• The operating system may no longer support modern versions of software.
• Or the operating system itself may no longer be supported or get new updates (Microsoft ended service for Windows XP on April 8, 2014).

So what is a school supposed to do with that 9 year old Dell desktop or that 7 year old Lenovo laptop? Typically we do one of the following:

• Sell the old desktops and laptops to an eRecycling company for scrap metal.
• Store the old equipment out of site, stacked up on pallets.
• Or keep them in the classroom despite their decreasing functionality.

Well now there is another option! Neverware has released a product called CloudReady that can turn old laptops and desktops into Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. There is a free option and a paid option depending on what you need.

Why should schools use GAFE instead of personal Google accounts?

Google provides free Google accounts to anyone. You can easily sign up for an account and get an email address like user@gmail.com, and get access to most all of Google’s tools such as Drive, Calendar, Sites, and more.

However, Google also provides schools with a different kind of account. Schools can get Google Apps for Education accounts, which we will call GAFE for short from here on out. Many schools around the world have rolled out GAFE to over 40 million students, but there are still many schools that may be considering this option.

Schools may wonder if users can get regular Google accounts, why should schools get GAFE accounts instead? Wouldn’t it be fine for staff and students to just use personal Gmail accounts?

It turns out that although personal Google accounts and GAFE accounts are similar, Google Apps for Education actually provides schools with a large number of additional features and tools that are not found in personal accounts, and are tailor made for the needs of a school.

See below to learn about many differences and benefits for using Google Apps for Education accounts in a school setting. You can click through the slideshow, read the blog post, or both. If you can think of other special features of GAFE versus personal accounts, feel free to add them to the comments below.