Instructional Technology Resources
Issue #15
Unclutter is a free Chrome and Firefox browser extension that anyone can use to remove the clutter from a web page. That's not all that Unclutter does. It also lets you save articles to read later, highlight and annotate articles that you save, and Unclutter lets you adjust the size and contrast of the text displayed on your screen.
The clutter that Unclutter removes from web pages include all sidebar content as well as all advertisements appearing above, below, and in the body of an article. Removing the advertisements appearing in the body of an article is a particularly helpful feature on sites like recipe websites that seem to have an advertisement appearing between every paragraph.
Focusable was built for the purpose of helping students learn how to focus on their work while ignoring distractions. An ancillary benefit of using Focusable is creating a little journal to document progress on a project. If you give students a little direction like “state what worked and what didn’t,” they can use Focusable to develop the skill of focusing while also documenting their progress on a project. You can then use your Focusable teacher account to view your students’ progress.
You can use Focusable without an account. Go to https://getfocusable.com/login, scroll to the bottom, click on Just Focus.
A lesson about every single element on the periodic table.
TED-Ed's Periodic Videos page features an interactive Periodic Table of Elements. Click on any of the elements to launch a video. Below the video you will find a link to the related TED-Ed lesson. (Note, I had to reduce my browser size to see the links). Each of the TED-Ed lessons provides a handful of multiple choice and short answer questions. The lessons also include some links to additional references.
Watchkin is a service that provides a few ways to watch YouTube videos without seeing the related video suggestions and comments. You can enter the direct URL of a video into Watchkin to have the sidebar content removed. You can search for videos through Watchkin and have family-friendly results displayed (if a video appears that is not family-friendly Watchkin has a mechanism for flagging it as inappropriate). Watchkin also offers a browser bookmarklet tool that you can click while on YouTube to have the related content disappear from the page.
