8 Great Chrome Extensions To Help Your Students With Writing Guest post by: Sophia Clark Writing can be challenging for many students, starting with elementary students and ending with college students. It requires a lot of attention to the details along with a huge variety of other skills: research, grammar skills, the ability to formulate and defend your point of view well, and so on. Lucky for all of us, these days writing is mostly digital. This means that the students are able to use so many tools that could ease their way into the writing process and help them. So if you want to help them, all you need to do is to pick some of these tools and introduce them to the students. Why should you use Chrome extensions? Extensions are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve students’ writing skills. They are added to the Chrome browser and can work both with websites and online documents. While such extensions are usually very easy to master, they don’t distract students at the same time. They are also easily managed and are usually free (or don’t cost much). Here are some of the best Chrome extensions that help strengthen writing skills. 1. Ginger. Improving one's writing usually starts with polishing the basics - and in order to do so, you need a nice spell and grammar check. Ginger is a Chrome extension that can give you that. It’s an advanced proofreading tool - and one of the smartest ones so far. Ginger not only spots errors and typos but also checks words in the context of every sentence, therefore detecting more mistakes. It also gives suggestions that can help students improve their writing. Price: $5.10 a month if you want grammar check features only. $9.25 a month if you want to unlock all features. 2. Mercury Reader. Sometimes students might struggle with how to write a good narrative essay not because their writing skills are poor but because they find it very hard to concentrate. Mercury Reader is an extension that can help students overcome that. This tool makes any text easier to read and analyze as it extracts it from all the materials that usually surround texts on websites: images, ads, links to other articles, and so on. Price: free. 3. MindMeister. Brainstorming and making connections is an essential part of essay writing. The MindMeister extension can help students with that. It allows creating mind maps and diagrams, connecting ideas and thoughts related to the writing. It also has several graphic templates and the maps can be saved in many file types too. Price: basic version is free and pro one costs $6 a month. 4. Co:Writer Universal. This tool allows to predict words and is especially good for students that have problems with spelling. When one starts typing a word, a box with several word predictions appears and you only need to choose the right one. It also has a spell-checking feature. Moreover, students are able to work with different dictionaries, depending on their vocabulary level or on the chosen topic. Price: free trial and $4.99 a month after the trial ends. 5. Scrible. Some students learn easier and faster while taking notes in the process. While it might seem hard to do while studying online, it’s not impossible. Scrible is an extension that allows taking notes with the help of different annotations - sticky notes, highlights, and so on. Students can also create a free account to save the annotated pages. Price: free. 6. WordQ. Another word prediction tool - only this one has an extra feature in it. It doesn’t simply suggest students the right words - it also gives them an example of these words used in a sentence in order to choose better and easier. It also has some basic formatting tools, allowing students to change the size of the text, make words bold, and so on. Price: US version is free. 7. SpeakIt!. SpeakIt! is a text-to-speech Chrome extension that can be useful for students that memorize words better when hearing them. SpeakIt! is easy to use: one has to select a certain word or words they need to hear and then click the icon on the toolbar. Students are also able to tailor the voice that reads the words, choosing the one they like the most. Price: free. 8. VoiceNote II. This Chrome extension is all about dictation. If one wants to dictate the text instead of writing it, they can do so with the help of this tool. Students are able to save the documents in the app itself or download them as text files of different formats. Price: free. Sure, the apps themselves are not enough to develop strong writing skills - doing so requires a lot of time and practice. However, they do help students with the basics, making the whole writing process a bit easier. About the Author: Sophia Clark graduated from the University in the City of New York with B.A. in Journalism, 2011. She is a creative writer who loves to share her thoughts with readers, now she writes for Eliteessaywriters. In her free time, she enjoys writing fiction as well as reading it. Connect with her on Twitter and Google +.
