A Cleaner YouTube - A Handy Browser Extension

A Cleaner YouTube is a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Once installed A Cleaner YouTube allows you to display YouTube videos without any of the "related videos," comments, or display advertising. There are other tools that do the same thing, but what makes A Cleaner YouTube different is that not only can you display videos without the related materials, but you can also search YouTube without viewing any of the "related videos," comments, suggested videos, or advertisements. I have before and after images displayed below.

Before:

After:

Applications for Education
If you work in a school that allows you to access YouTube in your classroom, A Cleaner YouTube could be a great tool to add to your browser. With A Cleaner YouTube installed you don't have to worry about accidentally displaying an inappropriate comment, advertisement, or related video.

H/T to Make Use Of. 

This Looked Like Fun - Learning Tools Family Feud

Thanks to one of Lee Kolbert's blog posts I just spent an hour watching what looked like the most fun ISTE session I've seen. Learning Tools Family Feud was a friendly competition between three men and three women who tried to correctly identify the most popular learning tools across fifteen different categories. The competition was moderated by Steve Dembo and featured the following six great librarians and educators; Joyce Valenza, Gwyneth Jones, Chad Lehmann, Shannon McClintock Miller, Matthew Winner, and Nicholas Provenzano. You can watch the whole session here.

Visit the Learning Tools Family Feud wiki to see all of the questions and all of the survey results. I think everyone can learn about a new resource by visiting the wiki.

The History of English - Entertaining and Informative

The History of English is a series of ten short videos providing an overview of the history of the English language. Each animated video covers a different  era in world history. The videos, developed by Open Learn, are available on YouTube and iTunes. I've embedded the YouTube playlist below.



Applications for Education
These videos don't offer much in the way of depth of explanation, but they could be useful as introductions to teaching a unit of study on a particular era in world history. The videos are also good representatives of the type of content that you can find for free on Open Learn. Open Learn hosts hundreds of text and video lessons on a wide range of topics. Not all of the content on Open Learn has corresponding videos. You can find the content that has videos by looking for the small camera icon next to the unit title.

H/T to Open Culture. 

Webcasts and Keynotes from ISTE 2011

If you were not able to attend the annual ISTE conference this year you can still access some of the great messages that were shared at the conference. All of the Elluminate recordings from ISTE Unplugged are now available online. To find the recordings just go to the ISTE Unplugged schedule and scroll to the right of the session titles to find the recordings. One of the recordings that I'm looking forward to spending some time with is Jackie Gerstein's Flipped Classroom Model: The Full Picture.

The opening and closing keynotes from ISTE 2011 are available on ISTE's YouTube channel. I've embedded below the closing keynote delivered by Chris Lehmann. Chris's message starts around the 37 minute mark in the video.