I don’t very often find myself writing about new tools much anymore, but this one is worthy of a post, simply because it is going to make some teachers’ lives so much easier.
ViewPure promotes itself as;
“Pure video viewing – Watch YouTube videos without comments, suggestions, or the ‘other’ things.”
It does just that. Look at the following screenshot to see what it looks like in action;
Our school permits access to YouTube, and teaching secondary students about the nature of content that appears on sites like this is part of our Digital Literacy teaching in my opinion. I do know that many schools block YouTube because of the potentially controversial content that can be found there, and many Primary School teachers would probably be quite uncomfortable with the related video content that appears, some of which has seemingly no relation to the educationally appropriate video you have just watched.
This is where ViewPure will be so useful. If you are a teacher wanting to use the video, but you don’t necessarily want to download a copy, just open up ViewPure in a new tab and enter the url of the video you want purified! The site has ads on it, and the one I’m looking at at the moment is for Russian girls looking for you! Rest assured, your purified video sits in a window by itself, and is safe for your class to view.
Pretty handy little web app in my opinion. Hope it doesn’t disappear anytime soon.
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
We use ViewPure and also recommend Silentube and Quietube which do a similar thing for Vimeo and other video sites. YouTube is blocked at school for students but not staff. Only time and education will bring about change.
Thanks Carmel for informing me about options I’d never heard of. I didn’t know about Silentube and Quietube.
Jenny : )
Thanks for this site Jenny! We also use Quietube at our primary school.
Kim 🙂
Hi Jenny!
My name is Alexa and I’m a sophomore at the University of South Alabama. I am in Dr. Strange’s EDM 310 class.
Thank you so much for sharing this useful tool! I know there have been many times in my high school career when this tool could have been useful. My school blocked YouTube because of the controversial comments and videos. This was a setback for both the students and the teachers. Teachers couldn’t show students videos that they thought went with their lesson. I’ll be sure to use this in my classroom!
Glad you found the post useful Alexa. Say hi to Dr. Strange for me. Tell him I love that he has pre-service teachers learning from teachers through blogs.