View What's Behind a Website With Mouse X-Ray Goggles

Mozilla used to offer a great little tool called X-Ray Goggles that let you view and modify the code behind any webpage. Unfortunately, they shut it down a couple of years ago and since then I've been recommending that people simply use Chrome's inspect tool to view the code behind a webpage. In fact, I even included that in my weekly newsletter this week. This week I discovered that Mouse.org offers its own X-Ray Goggles tool for viewing and modifying the code behind a page. 

Mouse.org's X-Ray Goggles tool lets you see the code behind any web page and change that code to display anything that you want in place of the original text and images. After you have made the changes you can publish a local copy of the web page. In this short video I provide a demonstration of how Mouse.org's X-Ray Goggles tool works. 

Applications for Education
Mouse.org's X-Ray Goggles provides a good way for students to see how the code of a webpage works.

As I mentioned in the video, you could use X-Ray Goggles to alter an article on the web to make it a satire story. Then print the page and give it to your students to try to identify the satire elements of the story.

Change the Appearance of Any Page With Mozilla's X-Ray Goggles

During the Best of the Web webinar that I hosted yesterday I mentioned Mozilla's X-Ray Goggles product. It's a great tool that lets you see the code behind any web page and change that code to display anything that you want in place of the original text and images. After you have made the changes you can publish a local copy of the web page. Watch the following video that I created to learn how to use Mozilla's X-Ray Goggles.


Applications for Education
Mozilla's X-Ray Goggles provides a good way for students to see how the code of a webpage works.

As I mentioned in the video, you could use X-Ray Goggles to alter an article on the web to make it a satire story. Then print the page and give it to your students to try to identify the satire elements of the story.

Hack the News With Mozilla's X-ray Goggles

Mozilla offers some great tools that can help students understand how webpages are created. Thimble is one of those tools that I have featured in the past. It offers many great activities for students to complete to learn how to build webpages including webpages with animations.

X-ray Goggles is another great tool that Mozilla makes to help students learn the code that powers much of what they see on the Web. X-ray Goggles is a free tool that lets you remix any page that you find on the Internet. (Note, it doesn't change the way others see the page, it only changes the way that you see it). To use X-ray Goggles you need to install it in your Chrome or Firefox bookmarks bar. Then you can launch it on any webpage. When you launch X-ray Goggles you will be able to select images and text on a page and then shown the code behind your selection. X-ray Goggles will let you then alter the code to display new things on that page.

Applications for Education
Mozilla offers a free lesson plan called Hack the News that introduces students to the features of X-ray Goggles. In the lesson students will remix a news story by putting their favorite fictional characters into the page on which the story is published.