8 Highly Useful Google Drive Extensions for Teachers

Google Drive is an excellent tool for teachers. It is free, and offers a wide variety of useful functionalities for digital documents. Teachers can use it to create tests and quizzes, or to store and share documents with students and colleagues.

The service also has some great capabilities in Google Draw  for creating mind maps and diagrams.  It’s already very popular in classrooms, so we definitely recommend that you explore its features.

Not only is Google Drive itself, an amazing cloud storage service, but it’s also possible to use it with a wide set of extensions. You can see a list of all available extensions by going to Google Chrome’s web store.

We have compiled a list of 8 extensions that we found to be the most useful. If you have some other recommendations, please let us know in the comments!

Cometdocs PDF Converter 

The Cometdocs PDF Converter app allows you to convert PDF documents right inside Google Drive, without having to leave the service. Google Drive itself offers conversion of documents of up to 2MB to textual format, but this extension offers conversion of large files, not only to textual format, but also to Excel, PowerPoint, Images, OpenOffice and much more. This extension could significantly save you time by being able to perform conversions from just one place.

Doctopus

This is an excellent extension made just for teachers. It allows them to manage and organize student projects right inside Google Drive. It has multiple functionalities, like being able to create deadlines for projects and monitor progress.

Google Classroom

This add-on is highly popular and allows both students and teachers to collaborate and work together in lectures, and on assignments  and projects.

Google Calendar

The Google Calendar app is excellent for setting up reminders and for better time management. You can set up alerts via SMS and never miss a meeting, lecture or any other important event.

PowToon Edu

This tool can help you to create engaging videos and presentations for students. Presentations and videos can later be downloaded to your  computer or shared via Youtube. As you can see from comments, teachers love it!

Pixl Editor

Pixl Editor is a powerful extension for editing images. Teachers can insert text and notes into images to make lessons clearer for students. Images can also be resized and cropped, along with many other free possibilities.

Draw.io

Draw.io is a powerful tool for creating diagrams. Diagrams are often used in classrooms because it is recommended to use visual representations of concepts and ideas while giving lectures. This makes students remember lessons better. There are many diagram creation tools around, but this one is great because it’s completely free.

GeoGebra

Math teachers will like GeoGebra because it will help in teaching students math concepts in an interactive way.