Three Great Tools for Cleaning Up Web Articles

As a teacher, I know that it's important for my students to be reading nonfiction as well as fiction.  One great way to incorporate nonfiction is by having students read online news articles.  I like to use The Week,  The Huffington Post, and the NY Times.  I'm also a frequent visitor of Kelly Gallagher's Article of the Week archives.  While all of these websites offer great news articles, printing nice "clean" ad-free copies for student use can be a bit of a hassle.  That's why I recommend the following web tools:

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Print Friendly is great because it's easy to use and, as a Google Chrome user, it has an easy-to-install web extension that converts the web site that I'm viewing with one click.  It also automatically converts the web page into a PDF file, so I can upload it to my classroom website without having to worry about using a word processing program that all of my students have.  Print friendly also has an option (by checking a box) to remove all images from an article--so much easier than clicking "delete" on every single one!

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Clean Print by Format Dynamics is another excellent choice for cleaning up web sites before printing.  Like Print Friendly, it also comes as a Google Chrome extension, so it can always be instantly available.  One added feature that I like about Clean Print is that, before you print, it will estimate the number of pages the print job will take, and you can watch the number go down as you delete unnecessary information.

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Print  What You Like is another fantastic option for printing the information you want on a website, while omitting all of the junk you don't, such as ads, reader comments, or links to other articles.  In my opinion, Print What You Like is a little more difficult to edit with because it's not always easy to get the red "delete" box on exactly the information you want to omit.  However, this is the only clean-up tool I know of that has an "isolate" button.  The "isolate" option is perfect when you only want to print a small section of an article, and going through to delete everything you don't want would just take up more time than it's worth.