I recently read an article on Lifehacker.com (one of my favorite websites) about how to use Chrome and Chromium Side by Side. Doing this will allow you to have multiple users or multiple accounts with the two almost identical allowing you to sync information from one computer to another.
Now this is very cool, but it got my brain thinking about another way to use the ability to sync Chrome browsers. How could I use this ability to sync in a school computer lab setting as a tool for education? Here is the idea:
First, set up a generic class Google account. This could be a regular Gmail account or a Google Apps account, it really doesn’t matter. You just need an account to set up the sync.
Second, set up Google Chrome on your classroom computer and set up the sync with this new account. You do this by clicking on the picture of the wrench, then “Preferences”, and then click on the “Personal Stuff” tab. (If you would still like to sync to your account and have the class account also, check out the link from Lifehacker in the first paragraph.)
Last, set up your classroom or lab computers with Google Chrome and start the sync with the class account on all of the Computers. (This may sound like a long process, but I think you will enjoy the benefits.)
Now comes the fun part. When you present your lesson to your students and need to share a link, you could give them a shortened URL or have the log in to a social bookmarking site like Diigo, but instead all you will have to do is create a bookmark on your browser. The bookmark will sync with all of the other computers in the lab tied to that class account. You could even do this on the fly in the middle of class (the students might need to hide and then show the bookmarks bar to refresh it). Even better, you could have one student share a link quickly with the rest of the class. If you wanted to take it to the next level, set up bookmark folders for different units/subjects, classes, or even students. This is social bookmarking without the extra log in for our students.
Some final clarification: You are only using the generic class account to set up the sync in the Chrome Browser settings. You and your students are not using this to log in on a Google Apps account. That is part of the beauty of this setup. You get to sync all the cool stuff with Chrome but you and your students will still be able to get to your individual accounts with your own mail, docs, calendar, etc.
Who said Google Bookmarks was dead? Now get out there and sync some bookmarks.
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