Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Remove Distractions from YouTube

Our students tend to be distractible.  Correct me if I am wrong.

I believe YouTube has enormous potential for instruction (hopefully your district does, too, and doesn't block it), but nothing annoys me more than when I take the time to locate a fun instructional video on YouTube, and while I am presenting it, student B says "OH, there's a link to ____, can we watch that  too?" Even more annoying is when they consider having YouTube on screen as an invitation to suggest unrelated videos out of the blue.  Gee, I am writing a lot here about being annoyed.  I am sure none of my readers ever get annoyed by students...

A good solution to this...distraction is using something like ViewPure, which allows you to present YouTube videos "without comments, suggestions, or the other things."  Simply copy/paste the URL location of the video (the web address at the top of your window when the video is playing on YouTube), and ViewPure will give you a new URL and screen that shows only that video, like this example.



Even better, ViewPure has a bookmarklet button you can drag up to your bookmarks bar in your browser, and it will "Purify" any YouTube video you would like, without having to navigate to ViewPure and cut/paste, etc.

Thank you to Richard Byrne for pointing out this resource.

3 comments:

  1. Thank God someone came up with this!! I can't tell you how many You Tube bloopers that my students with Autism have discovered...

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  2. That is awesome, Sean! I drove myself crazy during summer school making sure that videos I used for a perspective-taking group did not have distracting or inappropriate secondary video choices displayed at the end of each clip. This will help a lot!

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  3. Glad you guys liked it!

    Kathleen- one other thing you might do is embed the video yourself, and uncheck "Show related videos"- this could be another post here haha.

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