My new favourite tool: Skitch!

It's not often that I come across a tool that I begin using straight away, but I only discovered Skitch last Friday, and I have honestly used it every day!

Basically it's an image capture tool. You can either choose an area of your screen to copy, or take a photo from an attached webcam. What I really love about it though is the ease of which you can edit and then send your finished capture. There are options to resize, add text, arrows, shapes or freehand draw over your picture. Then the finished image can either be simply dragged to where you want to use it (I've been sending a lot of emails with images in this week!) or with one click you send it to your Skitch.com page where you get a variety of URL's for sharing. You can also choose which format the program saves your image as: jpg, png, tif, bmp etc

It comes from the same people who make Comic Life, which means that it is simple and intuitive to use. There is a 3 minute intro video that teaches you how to find your way around, but you won't need it.

I can see so many ways in which both teachers and learners would be able to use Skitch every day. How about taking an image of the whiteboard at the end of a shared writing session, then dropping it onto your class blog or VLE? Or using it as a quick and easy way of taking a picture of finished artwork with children annotating their thoughts over the top? It could also be used as an evaluation tool, between students or teachers.

Oh, and did I mention it's free..

Is anyone using Skitch in class already?