Grammarly for Chrome

Grammarly for Chrome is a free browser extension that enables grammar checking wherever your browse on the web.  Whenever you compose a new comment in your LMS, tweet, email, blog post, or anything else online, this browser extension will check your text for spelling and grammatical errors. Anytime you are writing in a comment field, Grammarly flags potential mistakes (see the graphic above) and allows you to review them one by one (by hovering your mouse over the text) or all at once (by opening a pop-up window).

The extension is available via the Chrome Web Store. It is free to use, but the premium version adds the following features:

• 150 critical grammar and spelling checks
• 100+ additional advanced grammar and spelling checks
• Vocabulary enhancement suggestions
• Genre specific writing style checks (academic, technical, creative, and other styles of writing)
• Plagiarism checker that looks through more than 8 billion (!) web pages

I use Grammarly to spell check all my blog posts. 🙂

Grammarly for Chrome

UPDATE: Nick from Grammarly contacted me and suggested that I post a link to Grammarly reviews. Here it is: http://www.grammarly.com/reviews.

Cool Things You Can Do in WolframAlpha

Wolfram Research informed me recently that Mathematica 11 is imminent. This reminded me that I have not talked about WolframAlpha. It is called the Computation Knowledge Engine, which means it is not Google. It is, however, a tool that digests data and produces all kinds of useful information. This tool is useful in many disciplines, not just mathematics. See below for some examples.

1. Business. Search for unemployment data in Chicago and you get the following:

   
   You also get a chart explaining the rate over a period of time.

2. History. Try “September 1945.” You get:

 

These are just two examples of what WolframAlpha is capable of. Check out the Examples section on the website to see what all it can do!

Now You Can Talk With Your Audience With Google Slides

One issue with public speaking with a presentation is that it tends to lean towards speaking TO the audience rather than speaking WITH the audience. Google just introduced a nifty feature called Slides Q&A.

With Q&A, the presenters now can insert a link into the Slides presentation, and the participants can submit questions from the smartphones or laptops while they view the slides in real-time. Additionally, the audience can vote on which question they want the presenter to answer the most. This adds an element of interaction with the audience. I know of no other presentation software that does this.

Watch the video below to see the feature in action.

Google also introduced a new laser pointer option on the web.

For information on how to implement Q&A, here is the link to the help article.