Screen Capture Software
One of the powerful illustrative features of web-based communications is the ability to easily add various types of media to illustrate, explain, or describe. For our ELT activities in our course, a portion of the grade for each assignment is based on how media is used in the posting.
So, what are some easy ways to add media to a blog posting? Perhaps the easiest is to take a screen capture of a particular screen of a technology or tool when describing the various features. There are many, MANY different ways in which to take screen shots and post them. I’ll share my favorites here, but I’d love to hear from others what are your favorites.
On my Windows machine, I personally use the free Howies’ Quick Screen Capture software available as a free download from howiesfunware.com. Below I’ve included a screen shot I took of the software open on my PC desktop, along with the available preferences available.
So why do I use “Howie’s” screen capture tool? A few reasons…
- It’s FREE
- I can specify a bunch of preferences, such as shortcut “grab” key to press when I want to take a screen shot, file format, quality, location to save the file to, etc.
- I can choose to either take a screen shot of my entire screen or just the active window
On my computer, I create a “Captures” folder and then have Howie’s set to save all my screen shots to this folder so it doesn’t clutter my desktop. Then, when I’m ready to add the images to either a blog post or some other online communication, I have all the images at my fingertips!
On my Mac, which is my preferred computer system, there are several, even easier ways to take screen captures. Mac OS X has a built-in keystroke shortcuts to take a screenshot of the entire screen (Command+Shift+3) or (Command+Shift+4) to have cross-hairs to select a specific location on the screen to capture. Here’s a short video description of how to capture screen images using Mac OS X.
Once you have a screen shot captured, whether you do it on a Windows or Mac computer, you can then easily upload the image(s) to your blog and embed them in your blog posting. Perhaps someone in our class who has already done this would be willing to record a short screencast explaining the steps? I’m hoping someone will take me up on this challenge 
If you’re a Mac user and you’re interested in going to the next level in you screen capture capabilities without spending $ for software, I’d recommend giving Skitch a try. Skitch is free Mac software bundled with a is a webservice that provides 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing. Here’s a 3 minute video introduction to Skitch.
So there you have it…hopefully, you have a few more ideas regarding adding media to your blog posts. If you are already using screen capture software, what software tool(s) are you using and why? If you have questions about screen capture or posting different types of media to your blog, make sure to bring those questions to an upcoming synchronous class session.