Chrome extensions provide a flexible and customizable browsing experience, enabling users to tailor their browser to suit preferences, increase productivity, and access additional features and functionalities. We tested a ton of extensions to find the best ones to help students increase their productivity. These are our favorites.

Hypothesis - Web &PDF Annotation

Hypothesis allows students to annotate, highlight, add notes to and tag web pages and PDF documents. The annotations and highlights are locked in place on the selected text, unlike many other annotation devices which move when scrolling. There is also a collaboration function, so groups can see each others’ annotations, making group projects a breeze. 

Read Aloud - A Text to Speech Voice Reader

Read Aloud uses text-to-speech technology to convert web pages to audio. It works on a variety of websites including news sites, blogs, textbooks, school and class websites and online university course materials. It offers a variety of different voice options and the reading speed and pitch of the voices can be changed with the click of a button. 

Wordtune - AI-powered Writing Companion

Wordtube is a writing aid that has the capability of rephrasing written texts. When a user types something, a purple dot appears-click on the dot and the Wordtune offers an alternative way of phrasing the selected text. It is particularly useful for rephrasing shorter bits of text like messages and annotations. 

Google Dictionary

Google dictionary does exactly what one would assume it does-it defines words the user highlights on a document or website. It simplifies the process of looking up words in that the user does not have to navigate away from their page and open a new browser tab to look up a definition. 

Google Scholar

Google Scholar was designed specifically to help students with the research process. It can find specific scholarly articles, find the original sources cited in papers and articles, help students format citations and save articles to their “Scholar library.” Google scholar searches also limit the search terms to legitimate academic papers instead of trying to crawl the entire web, so students can be relatively confident they’re using legitimate sources. 

Helperbird - Accessibility & Productivity App

Helperbird customizes a user’s web experience so that content is delivered in accessible format. It allows users to change fonts, text size, word and letter spacing, line height and paragraph width so students can read in whatever visual format works best for them. It also offers dyslexia and reading rulers as well as overlays and tints that assist students with reading disabilities. It also boasts adjustable text-to-speech capabilities and a variety of annotation options. 

Prowriting Aid - ProWriting Aid

ProWritingAid is an all in one editorial assistant. Like Wordtune, it has the power to offer its users alternative phrasing and will also highlight repetitiveness, vague wording, passive voice and overly complicated sentence structure. It also helps its users vary their sentence structure so their writing sounds more robust and less boring.

MyBib - Free Citation Generator

This free citation generator will help its users say goodbye to accidental plagiarism. Simply by clicking on an open article in a browser, MyBib will insert a citation in the users written text for the article they’re reading. Users can select from a variety of citation styles including APA, MLA, Harvard and Chicago Manual of Style. It also cites PDFs!

Wiseone - ChatGPT for Reading & Browsing

Wiseone is like a personal tutor that works with its users while they read. Using ChatGPT, it helps readers understand complex concepts by summarizing and explaining difficult text. It can also cross-check information within a text to ensure it is accurate as well as suggest additional reading to deepen the user’s understanding of key concepts.