Today’s post details a couple of easy extensions you can add to your Chrome browser—“Tab Scissors” and “Tab Glue.”  These extensions are easy to add and use, and help us as teachers organize how we work when we have a lot of Chrome tabs open at the same time. More importantly, we can teach digital organizational skills to our students if we really want to help them become comfortable living in front of a computer screen for certain aspects of work.

More importantly, these tools can be used to help teach digital organizational skills to your students and help them become comfortable living in front of a computer screen for certain aspects of work.

How-To – Tab Scissors and Tab Glue

Here is the general process for organizing your Chrome tabs using “Tab Scissors” and “Tab Glue.”

• Install both widgets from your Chrome browser.  
  • Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/ and search for them.  
  • Add them to your Chrome browser as an extension.  

• The “Tab Scissors” and “Tab Glue” tools should look like this:  

• When finished, the tools will appear in the upper right extension bar near the Customize/Settings tool.

When you have a lot of tabs open and available in Chrome, sometimes you’ll want to look at a couple of them at the same time in a split-screen effect.  

Let’s say your active tab is Google Drive like below:

Discuss with your students how to click and drag their tabs around to reorder them in a way that makes sense. Perhaps on one side, they need their email and research websites, and on the other, they want their Google Drive and other Docs that they are currently working on (their shared files versus their admin-related tabs). The “Tab Scissors” tool splits their browser screen into two panels.  Whichever tab was last the active one goes into the right-side group and the rest go to the left-side group.

Teach students to group their web tabs in Chrome into left groups and right groups, and use the Scissors for splitting their screen. The Glue extension puts everything back together. Again, it is worth it to model and use these tools to help students visually organize their computer screen, especially if we want them to live in a digital, near-paperless world!

For More

If you want to learn about other types of instructional technology for your classroom, try signing up for a trial of Online Professional Development at http://onlinepd.teq.com/.

I hope you try this and let us know your ideas for using Tab Scissors and Glue in your lessons.  Email us your classroom success stories and ideas at training@teq.com.