Screenshot Ninja

Learn to be a screenshot Ninja!

Screenshot (1)

If you learn one skill this week it should be how to take a screenshot on whatever device you use.  This is one of the most versatile and simple tech tools you can use.  On any given day I will can take endless screenshots for all types of different reasons.

There are two types of screenshots:

Copy to clipboard– You would use this for anything that doesn’t require a file.  For example- if you found a portion of a website that you want students to focus on.  Here, I found a brief summary of an article at http://www.1jour1actu.com/ that I could add to a Slide deck or to a Google Doc for an assignment.  This is the quickest and easiest way to take a screenshot. You don’t have to have a bunch of files sitting around of stuff you don’t really need.

Screenshot 2016-06-15 at 4.16.02 PM
Example of a screenshot capturing only certain information from a webpage.

I’m a big fan of narrowing what students are looking at, so they know what to focus on and taking a screenshot can help.  Often, I use screenshots to divide longer texts or pdfs into different sections.  This can help improve reading comprehension be limiting what students are seeing.

Save as a file: You only need to use this option if need a file for some reason, like you are going to import the picture into a Google Form, or Kahoot,  or any place where the only option would be “upload file.”  This is the least common of the two and the great part is if you “copy to clipboard” and then need the file you can just go back and redo it.  The file will most likely end up in your downloads file.

Also, for either of the above you can take a picture of the entire screen or choose to take just a selection.

Choose your screenshot tool

Just like when you have to screw in a screw you choose a tool, you have to do the same thing with taking a screenshot.  Do you want to annotate it?  Do you want to add text?  Do you need it to show the right click option?  Do you want to show the whole screen and not just your browser?  Just like you don’t choose a screwdriver to put up drywall, you wouldn’t choose the most basic tool for something that requires finesse.  For any given task, I might use two or three tools to take a screen shot.  Additionally, how you take a screen shot depends on what device you are using.

Click on the device you’re using to learn how to be a screenshot Ninja.

Chromebook

Mac

PC

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