Right Click Disabled....Grrrrr!

It has been forever since I last posted!  I have been swamped with projects left and right from work and just have not been able to find the time (or effort) to come here and post.  I feel bad in saying that last line because I am still very excited about sharing technology information with you to help you meet your tech needs in your lessons and classroom.  I hope you can cut me some slack because of my huge work load.  My friends that work with me know just how swamped I have been.  Don't get me wrong either....I love doing tech projects!  It is in my blood.  But deadlines must come before the blog...followed closely by spending time with my children and getting some sleep...LOL!

You may have noticed that I added a little something to my blog.  In the upper left hand side you will see that it says Right Click Disabled.  Many people get angry when people disable the right click feature on their webpages.  I understand why people do it though.  When you are on a web page that is not protected, right clicking will allow you to copy, save, or print something that is on a web page.  People who want to share their photos, artwork, or anything else but do not want people to take it and use it for their own purposes will make sure to protect their page by disabling that right click option.  That is not why I did it.  I have all of these links on my pages for student and teacher use that I want them to go and check out and use.  Almost every time I walk into my lab the past few weeks I find papers in the printer where a student has right clicked on my blog page and has hit print.  I don't think they are doing it on purpose.  I think they are in a hurry and are clicking that right mouse button on accident and when it brings up that menu they just left click to get rid of it, which will then print the page.  I do not like that there is not a confirmation box that makes sure you really want to print, so I had to find a way to keep this from happening as it is just a waste of paper and ink.

Of course, I went out to my favorite search engine Google and put in the search box about how to disable right click on blogspot.  I found a whole bunch of posts about how you shouldn't do that because it makes users angry because they feel limited.  While I totally understand that view point, I still had to wrestle with the printing issue, and the printing won out over anyone being irritated at me for blocking them from using that right click.  I am sure that I am not the only person out there that has struggled with this issue.  I will send you anything you want or need from my blog in an email if you want something.  I just needed a way to block student printing, or rather, the too easy way of printing.

So how did I do it?  Bwahh haa haaa... (horrible evil laugh, I know....) I used my evil genius brain and wove special traps and snares to keep you all out!  Not really.  I just added a "gadget" to this blog: HTML/JavaScript and copied and pasted a script in that someone else wrote.  I did go in and add my own little message that pops up and lets you know that right clicking has been disabled, and I even said why because I felt so guilty about blocking it after reading all of those posts online about why you should NEVER do this to your followers.  So I do feel badly that I have resorted to this, but the other side of me feels good because I am just trying to save a few trees.  I am totally open to suggestions on how to stop them from being able to right click and print if anyone has any special code to just block the printing and not the copy part.  Feel free to shower me with any advice or code that would help.

Now I just have to go through all of the computers and remove that pesky print icon off of the browser because in all of their fast, mad clicking that they do they still find a way to click on that silly icon and....PRINT my blog.  However, the printing of the blog has come down considerably, so I know that disabling that right click was a good decision.

Again, this had nothing to do with my trust in my fellow teachers or followers.  I know that we teachers are always "borrowing" information and cool pictures to help teach our students.  We are scavengers and proud of it.  If we are not given all of the tools we need to get an idea through to our students, well we will just go that extra mile and find what we need.  Sorry about that to all of the people who we have "borrowed" from!