Thursday, February 21, 2008

Firefox Add-ons




I may never log-in manually to my Blogger account again to publish posts. I may be slow to this and am feeling a bit like I missed the boat big time but I am just now discovering the extraordinary value of Firefox Add-ons.

My interest in Firefox Add-ons started about a month ago when I first del.icio.us buttons to my browser. Before then I was using Firefox as-is. It seems to me that add-ons must be a huge reason Firefox has taken off so well in the browser battle. Today I added three new add-ons to my browser that I think have great value for education.

  1. ScribeFire - coordinates with your blog account to allow you to publish blogposts directly from Firefox without having to login yourself to your account. The post editor looks pretty good too.
  2. Zotero - This amazing add-on is meant specifically for education and scholarly research. It is a way of keeping track of research and other literature that is out there in electronic format. There are just too many features this add-on offers to describe. Basically, it combines a bookmark feature with note taking and citation tools. You just have to see it.
  3. IE Tab - Before installing this I had to use IE7 to adequately login to the course managemnt system for my part-time online teaching job. This would be a big problem if my full-time school district switched to Linux. What this add-on does is emulate IE in Firefox so Firefox will display IE only websites. I tried it and it seemed to work better than IE.

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