Chromebook Apps for Young Learners

Are you a Chromebook user under the age of ten? While you may not be, quite a few students among the almost thirty million students in U.S. schools. Luckily, there are many Chrome add-ons which are age-appropriate for young learners. In this blog entry, we will explore a few common Chromebook apps.

Mathematics

• ADDieMATH – Basic Fact Practice is made easy with this Chrome add-on featuring activities that provide students in grades 1-5 the opportunity to practice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
• Math Quizzes – Per the website, this add-on “helps parents and kids to love math (and not only), by turning it through playing in a rescue mission for Earth, from an alien invasion. The kids win points, levels and prizes by solving quizzes, creating new quizzes and working inside a team.”
• Monster Math – This app provides opportunities for students to learn addition, subtraction, and multiplication with animated cute monsters.

Language Arts

•  Alphabet Tutor – Letter identification using the keyboard for the young. The goal of the designers is to assist students in learning the names of letters pressed, as well as to assess students’ ability to locate a specific letter on the keyboard.
• Brainy Kids Puzzles– This add-on has fifty colorful jigsaw puzzles. These seek to promote spatial and word recognition skills.
• Coloring Pages – Offers coloring pages for young learners. You can see a selection of what’s available online.
• Into Words – Enables you to highlight texts on web pages or PDF documents. Into Words will read the text up for you in Danish, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish and Norwegian. An additional forty languages with 98 voices can be used.
• Read&Write for Google Chrome – This add-on offers a wide range of tools, including text-to-speech, text/picture dictionaries, speech-to-text, dictation, word prediction, and more. You can collect highlights from text in documents or the web, create and then listen to voice notes inside of Google Docs, and simplify/summarize text to remove ads.
• Sight Words– Provides students with 315 Dolch sight word flashcards. Each word comes with audio. The goal is to use sight words with young learners to achieve balanced reading instruction.
• Storybird – This add-on provides a creative digital story-building tool for readers, writers, and educators.

Utilities

Looking for some tools for your own use? Here are two lesser known ones you may find helpful.

• 1-Click Timer – Interactive timer that has music playing while it counts down.
•  Anyone Can View  – Use Alice Keeler’s extension to grant anyone with the link view access.

Chromebook Apps for the Young

These are only a few of the available Chrome add-ons available for young learners. Share in the comments what your favorite add-ons for young learners are.