Safari has allowed third-party extensions for a few years now, and there are quite a few that can be extremely useful to teachers and students. Here is my curated list.

1. Lazarus: Form recovery

Ever had one of those moments when you’ve finally finished filling out a long form and hit submit only to see an error message? And when you hit the back button the form was blank…

Lazarus saves everything you type in forms (e.g. feedback on Moodle, task description on Managebac, reports in your student information system, etc.) and displays it again should a problem occur (or you click on the pesky ‘Back’ button), so that you don’t have to type it again. The Lazarus extension for Safari has saved me hours of re-typing due to technical problems or user errors.

Lazarus extension for Safari can be found here.

2. Adblock

AdBlock banishes all ads on all web pages. Once you install AdBlock, you’ll immediately see the results. Visit your favorite websites and watch as ads disappear.

Adblock does exactly what it says on the tin. This is extremely useful, especially when you have your computer hooked on to your projector. I’m sure quite a few of us have had ads displayed on the screen that we wouldn’t want students (especially younger ones) to see. Adblock extension for Safari is the answer to (inappropriate/annoying/add your own) adverts. Please do remember that some sites exclusively rely on advertising to survive, so you may want to disable Adblock for those sites that you couldn’t do without.

Adblock extension for Safari can be found here.

3. Clea.nr for Youtube

Now you can watch YouTube videos without all the visual distractions of the website.

Clea.nr does an excellent job of removing all of the clutter from Youtube pages (e.g. related videos, multiple share buttons, etc.) but my favourite feature is the ability to hide the comments. Let’s face it, Youtube comments often contain language that we wouldn’t want students to see.

Clea.nr extension for Safari can be found here.

4. Cuss-off

Cuss-off extension blocks swear and profanity words from appearing on webpages, replacing them with asterisks.

Cuss-off is another extension that will avoid quite a few embarrassing moments when surfing the Web. It looks for swear words on a page, and replace them with asterisks instead. It acts a bit like a swear word filter.

Cuss-off extension for Safari can be found here.

5. Turn off the lights

This extension dims everything in the background, so you can enjoy the video you’re watching without any distractions.

Turn off the lights extends the feature-set of clea.nr and allows you (or your students) to truly focus on the video you are trying to watch. I have found it to be particularly useful when showing videos on a dim projector.

Turn off the lights extension for Safari can be found here.

6. Awesome screenshot

Awesome Screenshot lets you capture, annotate, and share screenshots with a click. You can crop, show area dimensions, annotate with shapes and text, and blur your screenshot. You can even choose to capture the entire web page.

If you ever need to take screenshots of an entire webpage (or at least longer than what is shown on your screen), then Awesome Screenshot extension for Safari is what you need. It is extremely easy to use.

Awesome screenshot extension for Safari can be found here.

7. Buffer

I use Buffer a lot, and this extension saves me a few seconds every time I want to ‘buffer’ something. If you don’t know what Buffer is, check this out to see if it would be of use to you.

Buffer extension for Safari can be found here.

8. Franker (translation)

Franker injects the translation directly into the original text. You can read words or sentences in a foreign language first, then check to see if you understood everything. It’s designed to help you learn new words and phrases in context. Franker can inject translations for an entire web page or just part of it.

This is a really interesting extension for teachers who work abroad and don’t really understand the local lingo (that would be me). I can also see some potential for teaching modern foreign languages, although it would need quite a bit of teacher input to make the activities really meaningful and authentic.

Franker extension for Safari can be found here.

9. Pocket for Safari

Pocket is a fantastic free service, which allows you to save Web pages and tag them. I use this extensively to curate the Web, and this extension saves me time on a daily basis. Students and teachers can use Pocket to organise their research.

Pocket extension for Safari can be found here.

10. Evernote Web Clipper

Evernote Web Clipper is the easiest way to remember things you see online. Unlike bookmarks it lets you save actual web pages complete with text, links, and images. Clip entire articles & read it later from any device where you have Evernote installed. Clip selections, clip full page or clip the URL — directly to your Evernote account.

Evernote Web Clipper is really handy to help teachers curate the huge amount of information they find online. It makes the process of saving snippets of information and Web pages to your Evernote account a breeze.

Evernote Web Clipper for Safari can be found here.

11. QR code generator

The QR Code Generator extension for Safari allows you to generate a QR Code for the current URL. QR Codes can be scanned and read by mobile devices that have cameras and decoding software.

While I don’t personally use QR codes, a lot of colleagues do and have shared great success stories. QR Code Generator extension for Safari is a really good options for teachers who find using QR codes useful.

The QR code generator extension for Safari can be found here.