Google Chrome (Thing 5)

I have mixed feelings about Google Chrome. On one hand, it's definitely faster and more efficient than the other browsers I've been using, so I think I'll continue to use it. On the other hand, being asked to link my professional email to a browser and install apps and extensions that ask for permissions to "read and change all the data on the websites I visit" makes me really uncomfortable. It's not that I'm trying to hide anything or have anything to hide, just that I think we have too much of our information on the internet as it is and I would like to minimize my contribution to that.

To that end, I installed three apps that had permissions with which I was comfortable: Typing Club, Newsela, and Desmos. Typing Club was a great find because I've had several parents ask me about how to help their children become better typists; I actually just emailed one to tell her about it. I liked that it had a series of increasingly difficult typing skills (including how to sit properly at a computer) and that it was very user-friendly. It's easy, you don't need a program (I used Mavis Beacon in the 90s, which is still around, it seems!), and installation takes only seconds. Desmos was cool because the graph appeared instantly and was pretty to look at, and Newsela is a wonderful service overall (I particularly enjoyed the article about Harry Potter increasing children's tolerance of others).

I looked around the Chrome store and saw some other apps and extensions that looked cool; Readability and Instapaper spoke to me since I'm someone who consistently has more than 20 tabs open because I click on articles that I would like to read but don't have the time to in that moment. Both seem like they would save me some time and browser crashing because they allow me to save articles and read them offline if I want to. For classroom use, I like the idea of read&write, which allows students to look up definitions of words and hear passages read aloud to them.

I would recommend Chrome to my colleagues because it does work better than other browsers, and I know that other people like to customize their experiences even if I don't. It works well with the Google apps that I like because it is designed to do so, and even if I'm not using it to its full capacity, I like what it does for me.