I think of summer as an opportunity for teachers to try some things that may be useful during the time when they work with students. Here is an easy recommendation. Try the Brave Browser.
Brave can be installed on any device and is based on chromium so anyone who has used Chrome will know pretty much everything there they need to know to use it. I have yet to find an extension I use on Chrome that will not work with Brave.
I recommend Brave for two reasons. First, it blocks ads, cookies, and scripts. I have few concerns about ads, but the collection of information about me and my online behavior through cookies is a concern. Brave can block all of the intrusion and turn capabilities back on for specific sites if necessary. I have found a few sites that require cookies for full functioning.
As I said, I am not concerned with ads per se and I understand that ads are a legitimate source of revenue that supports content creators and infrastructure providers. Brave is part of an ecosystem that provides a solution. If you are willing to view ads provided by Brave, you will be compensated with BAT for viewing these ads. BAT (basic attention token) is a type of cryptocurrency. Rather than keep this incentive, I suggest you use it to provide micropayments to the sites that register with Brave. This is a way to compensate content creators and online infrastructure services that rely on ad revenue.
The system is still evolving and has some obvious limitations. First, many service and content providers have not registered with Brave. In some cases (e.g., Google) there is a conflict of interest. Second, the ads shown seem dominated to cryptocurrency-related companies. I suppose this is because Brave is associated with a cryptocurrency and users may be more open to this means of exchanging revenue. I believe there is a chicken and egg situation with advertisers. The audience brings interest in advertising and too many shy away because they don’t understand crypto. You don’t have to understand or invest yourself to use Brave. I think of the system as a type of micro-payment system. If there was a similar service that allowed me to dole out a few pennies here and there based on my online behavior, I would it a try as well.
The following video provides a glimpse of Brave.
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