Wednesday 21 July 2010

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?

Tuesday 20 July 2010

What's in a name?

Blimey, what a mission naming this blog was!
The first 3 names I wanted were already taken. Predictable I suppose, but having looked at these blogs I can see that 2 are now unused, their last posts being over 3 years ago. A shame.
So, was I being too obvious in my naming? Blogger helpfully tried to suggest some alternatives that included my name, but this wasn't what I was after.
The next title I tried was available, excellent! But this made me stop and think...why had nobody else thought of this one, did it have another meaning that I was missing that would cause people to stay well clear when they saw it...? The name being available actually put me off choosing that one. It looked dull and boring.
I then chose to look for inspiration from the blogs that I read each day. Some are simple, just the author's name, others use a play on words...maybe I could try that? An unreasonable amount of time followed where I looked up quotes that I could play with, and used a rhyming dictionary for a snappy title.
Nothing.
So I got to thinking, does my blog title really matter? Would the title put people off reading what I have to say? And in the end I decided that no, as long as its not too daft, no-one is really going to care what my blog is called.
I hope you enjoy my posts here. I'm going to be writing mainly about the learning that takes place when I work with students when they come in to the CLC and when I go out to support learning in schools.
I'd love to know if you stopped by!