As we continue to work on our new web site project, Help Guides are regularly distributed to faculty to provide guidance as page management is learned. I generally get good feedback about the Help Guides; readers find the instructions clear and the prose understandable. And I appreciate that feedback! But if a comment is forthcoming, most often it concerns the fact that the Help Guides are illustrated. Teachers, like students, tend to remember, comprehend and retain content more reliably if it is visual.
I'd like to use this posting to talk a bit about the illustrations in the Help Guides. With a better understanding of how they are created, you might find opportunity to use the same types of illustrations in work you produce for students.
Screenshots are pictures taken directly from your screen. (The are also called screen captures and screen grabs.) You can take a full screen screenshot or through a cropping tool, retain an image of any part of your screen. The last post in this blog was written after reading the Walter Issacson's biography of Steven Jobs. Below, you see a full screenshot when the blog page is opened.
In Windows 7, there are two easy ways to obtain a screenshot. You can click on the "Print Screen" key on the keyboard. By doing this, you've copied the image onto your clipboard, ready to pasted elsewhere. One easy approach to managing this copied file is to open your PowerPoint program and have a blank slide ready. Paste you image into the slide. Now, right click on you mouse while the cursor is over the image. One of the options is "Save as Picture." Follow the prompts to create a picture file. You could also paste the copied image into MS Paint, Adobe Photoshop or other image editing programs.
The above instructions work well with Windows XP as well, but Windows 7 offers new software to users - a Snipping Tool. It's found in the Accessories folder after clicking on All Programs near the start button. The Snipping Tool allows you to copy all or any part of your screen. Additionally, there are some basic editing tools that allow you to annotate your image. You can highlight text and use a "pen" to write or draw freehand. But it's difficult to create an annotated image that looks good. See for yourself.
A program I invested in years ago is Snagit, a TechSmith product. This software is perfect for creating annotated screenshots. It has an array of arrows, shapes, fonts and call-outs. It it is simple to learn and easy to use. Following annotation, screenshots can be managed in a variety of ways. Below, an example:
Are screenshots different in the Mac operating system? Yes and no. The keyboard commands for a full screen or cropped screenshot are different, but the end result is the same. Using a Mac, Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot of your desktop image and save it to your desktop. Command-Shift-4 allows you to crop the image and save a partial image to your desktop. And Macs come with Grab, software similar in function to the Snipping Tool. There are a variety of other keyboard commands that might prove useful as well.
And finally, it's easy to overlook some features of MS Word, our most frequently used word processing program. In updated versions of Word on the Insert tab, you'll find several options that can be very useful in creating and annotating images for your document. The Shapes option allows you to select a variety of arrows to point to pertinent information. The Text Box option allows you to create a free-floating box of text that can be fully formatted. And the Screenshot option allows you to create a full or partial desktop screenshot of any open window. It's very handy.
For almost anything you'd like to do on your computer, there are usually several ways to accomplish the task. Screenshots are no exception. Find an approach that is comfortable and you've got a great tool to add interest and depth to documents you are creating.
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