Make Web Pages Easier to Read with Mercury Reader Chrome Extension

When you or your students are reading online for information, a typical web page can look a lot like this:

Reading online can be complicated by all of the
extraneous elements we find on web pages.

There is a tool that can help make reading for information online a less distracting task. It is called Mercury Reader, and it is an extension that can be used in your Chrome web browser.

When you install Mercury Reader, you can click on it to remove all of the extraneous information from a web page you are trying to read. Here is a side-by-side comparison of what an article on CNN.com looks like without Using Mercury Reader, and what it looks like when the extension is being used.

Benefits of Mercury Reader

• Easy to toggle on and off.
• Takes away extraneous and possibly distracting information such as ads or links to content which might not be related to the content being read.
• Allows the reader to adjust font size and style for easier reading.
• Allows reader to choose a theme which puts white print on a dark background. 
• Can aid dyslexic or visually impaired readers who are reading content on the web.

How to Use Mercury Reader

Below is a 4 1/2 minute tutorial I recorded which shows how helpful Mercury Reader can be while still being very simple to use. I hope this tool will be of benefit to you and your students. Please take time to comment on this post if you decide to try Mercury Reader or if you have other tips for making reading on the web easier.

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please see specifics on my re-use policy before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Search for Mobile Apps Using Google

Yesterday I learned from a TCEA Tweet that Google has launched an app search feature. What a cool tool for those of us working in mobile learning environments - whether they be individual teacher devices, pods of classroom devices, 1:1, or BYOD - to use to explore app possibilities without having to log into an app store first!

I played with app search a little and made a quick tutorial video to show you how to access it and an idea I had for combining it with Google's advanced search feature. Hope this is helpful to you! If you have any other ideas for using Google's new app search, please share below in the comments.