Google Chrome is a web browser that allows a user to do more than just browse websites. Today I’m giving you three tips and tricks for utilizing Google Chrome to the best of its capabilities and keep things organized.
Using Multiple Profiles
First things first, if you’re not using the multiple profiles option, you’re really missing out. Using multiple profiles helps keep information from your different Google accounts separated. A lot of people will just sign into multiple accounts on the same browser, so you end up mixing up your information (like passwords, bookmarks, and such) from your work and personal accounts.
Instead of doing this use, Google Chrome’s profile management allows you to have your different accounts separated in separate browser windows. All you need to do is click on the profile circle in the top right part of Chrome (the one next to the three dots menu) and turn on syncing for whichever account you’re signed into.
At the bottom of that menu, you can add more profiles. Add a new person for each Google account that you have. This allows you to keep all of your settings for each account separate. For example, I have a work account, a couple of personal accounts, and an author account, so all of my bookmarks for work are in one browser window and all of my personal bookmarks are in another one. It helps a lot with organizing bookmarks, passwords, extensions, and so on.
Speaking of extensions…
Chrome Extensions
The second thing you should utilize is Google extensions. The real power of Chrome lies in adding extensions that increase the capability of what Chrome can do. An extension adds a button to your Google Chrome browser that allows you to do any number of things. You can do things like save pages to Google Drive, send something to your Google Classroom, or read the text of a page to you.
Extensions help save yourself time and effort as well as help you stay organized. There are a multitude of extensions you can add to Chrome. If you want to get started with Google extensions, you can check out my post about some of my favorite Google extensions.
Bookmarks Tricks
The next thing to help keep things clean and organized is a couple of tricks with the bookmarks bar. If you use the bookmarks bar like I do, you may notice that it gets cluttered up very quickly. Between folders and bookmarks and such, you may have only a handful of them that you can actually see in your bookmark bar and then you have to click the pulldown menu to see the rest.
Two things can save a lot of space on your bookmarks bar. First, use favicons from websites you use a lot. Favicons are the small icons on the tab that visually identifies the website. If a website has a favicon, it’ll show up when you bookmark it. Use that instead of the name of the site. Right click on the bookmark and then click rename. You can erase the entire name of the bookmark and save. All that’s left is the icon for the site, and it only takes up very little space.
With folders, we can do something similar. I use emojis instead of text. Again, huge space saver. Instead of naming my folder “technology” or “ed tech” that will take up a lot of space on the toolbar, I just have a little computer emoji that indicates that it’s all of my ed tech sites.
So there are three quick and easy tips to make the most of the Google Chrome web browser.
Got any other great tips about Chrome? Let me know in the comments section.
The Educator's Quest 