Print What You Like
What it is: I don’t know about you, but printers can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, if you have one, your students are able to print out their work and finished projects; on the other, printers also make for a lot of wasted pages and ink when students (or teachers) are printing from the Internet. Print What You Like solves this problem by letting you format any web page for printing. No more pages of ads, empty space, and the extras that you didn’t want. Print What You Like works in three easy steps: 1. Go to Print What You Like and paste the URL of the page you want to print, 2. Edit the page, 3. Print it! Very easy and a great way to cut down on paper waste! I like that there is nothing to download with Print What You Like, it runs directly from your browser. You can make the page you are printing more readable by changing font size and typeface and removing the background. Print What You Like gives you the ability to combine multiple web pages by editing them and printing them as one document. You can even save your modified page as a PDF or HTML document…so cool! If you sign up for the service, you can even save the changes you make to a page so that other pages from the same site are automatically formatted the same (I’m thinking this would be great for recipe sites!).
How to integrate Print What You Like into your curriculum: Introduce students and other teachers to Print What You Like for printing web pages. Post instructions for using Print What You Like next to classroom computers, printers, and in the computer lab (I have attached the instructions card that I created for Print What You Like below. Feel free to print it out and use it in your classroom or computer lab). Make it even easier to use Print What You Like and add it to the bookmark bar in your favorite browser or add the bookmarklet editor directly to your browser.
Tips: If you have a website that students are constantly printing from, consider adding a printer friendly button that creates a printer friendly version of your website with the click of a button.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Print What You Like in your classroom!