Chrome Extension: Tab Scissors and Tab Glue

Have you ever been working on the Internet and needed to view two pages simultaneously? {The most obvious teacher situation that comes to mind would be when you have students submit work via a paperless channel such as Seesaw, Google Drive, or Dropbox, and then you need to transfer their grades over to the digital grade book, but there are lots of other instances where this might come in handy!} It can be annoying to keep clicking back and forth! You could open a new window and spend precious time trying to size them exactly right... or you could let free Chrome extensions {Tab Scissors and Tab Glue} do the work for you.

Install the Extensions

1. Make sure you have a Google account. {If you have a Gmail, YouTube, or Blogger account, you have a Google account. It's possible to connect an existing e-mail -- like your school e-mail -- to a Google account; ask me about that if you're interested in learning more! I definitely recommend separating personal from professional, so if you only have a personal Google account, I'd make another one specifically for school.}

2. Launch Google Chrome {download it here if you don't already have it}.

3. Sign in to your Google account on Chrome. {Click the small silhouette of a person in the top, right corner to sign in for the first time.}

4. Click here to view the Tab Scissors extension page. To install it, click the blue "add to Chrome" button in the top, right corner of the pop-up box.

5. Important: you must add the Glue extension, too! Click here to view the Tab Glue extension page. Install it the same way you installed the Tab Scissors extension.

To Use

1. You can have more, but you must have at least two tabs open in Chrome, as shown below:

{One tab is automatically opened when you launch your Chrome browser. To open a new tab right next to it, click the small square on the very right, as shown below.}

2. Click any tab except the first one. In the screenshots above, I knew that my second tab was selected because it a) was lighter than the other tab, b) appeared in front of the other tab, and c) I could see this technology blog on the screen. :)

3. Click the Tab Scissors to make a "cut" between the tabs:

{Your scissors and glue icons should appear somewhere in the top, right of your Chrome browser.}

4. The screen will split automatically, like this:

By default, it will split your screen right down the middle. If you want to change the size of either window, just hover in the middle until you get a double-sized arrow pointer. Then click and drag the window size to whatever you need.

If I'd had more than 2 tabs open, the split would occur right before the tab I had selected. For instance, let's say I had my Twitter page, technology blog, and Pinterest page all open in different tabs. If my technology blog was selected and showing on the screen when I clicked the Tab Scissors, my screen would be split with my Twitter page on the left and my tech blog and Pinterest page on the right.

5. When you're ready to go back to multiple tabs in one screen again, click the Tab Glue to paste them back together:

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