FTT - Multiple User Accounts for Chrome

Posted by "verndewd"

Managing Multiple Google Accounts in Chrome

@joe-edtech

Welcome back to another year of learning! I'm excited to announce that my Free Tech Tool Tuesday blogs will be co-written by my friend and partner, Lisa Berghoff, Director of Instructional Technology at Highland Park High School. Hopefully together we will be able to bring you some good ideas for enhancing your classroom. HOWEVER, we wanted to start the year with a solution to make the lives of teachers easier! 

Many of us have gotten “googly” in the past few years and there is a very good chance that you have more than one google account. We all have our Google education accounts through District 113 but you may also have a personal account or multiple other google accounts. Managing these accounts can get frustrating and confusing because as you switch back and forth, you will need to constantly be checking to make sure the correct account is the one that is active.  Since I don’t need any more frustration or confusion in my life, I have learned a simple solution that will keep all of your various things Google in their proper place.

First, here is the wrong way:

You might be tempted to click in the corner of your screen and click the “Add account” button. You might already have added your accounts and you might see that you can toggle back and forth between those accounts. Please resist the urge to do this! If you haven’t run into problems yet, you will.  You might click a link and the wrong account will come up. Or, you might be prompted to re-sign in multiple times. The lines become very blurry between your accounts and before you know it, your vacation itinerary will end up in your school account and your students will be booking their spring break trip just so they can join you on the beach.

How to manage multiple google accounts.

Step 1: Use google chrome. Go figure, google works best when you are using their chrome browser.

Step 2: Sign out of all of your accounts except for the account you use the most.

Here’s how you do that…

Click your account in the upper right hand corner of the browser window and click “sign out”. The page will say: Choose an account. Click remove: X out of all except your primary account.

Step 3: Select your primary account, and re-sign in. Step 4: Go to Account Settings

You may be required to sign into chrome again. (I know!) You will now only see 1 account in the upper right hand corner.

Step 5: Set up google profiles in chrome. (This is where the magic happens!) Click on settings and make sure you are signed in. If you are not signed in, go ahead and do that and link the data. Then click top right. It shows you which account you are using. To add another account, click on “add person:"

When you click “add person” a new chrome window opens. prompting you to log into chrome. This time, log in with your secondary account and go ahead and link the data.

Each of your chrome profiles will be slightly different depending on the extensions and apps that you use with each account. You will now have 2 different browser windows with 2 different accounts. You can easily switch between the windows and your google profiles can stay safely apart from one another. (On a PC, Chrome will actually add an additional shortcut to your desktop or taskbar. On a Mac, you’ll need to “toggle” between people - which is explained below.)

You can toggle between accounts in the upper right corner.

This takes a little extra time to set it up but this will help you manage multiple accounts effectively moving forward.

Here is a short video that walks you through the same process: