Tag Archives: screenshot

August 25, 2011, 3:00 pm

Make Tutorials Easily with Clarify

ProfHacker has a longstanding interest in tools for screen capture, screencasts, and the like. We’ve reviewed apps like Skitch (Mac), Greenshot (Windows), Screenr (browser-based), and ScreenSteps. There’s just something appealing about the ability to quickly explain technology by showing what it looks like.

Blue Mango Learning, the makers of ScreenSteps, which George raved about two years ago, have introduced a new program, that simplifies the task of annotating multiple screenshots, combining them in a tutorial and instantly sharing them with others. Clarify is an OS X app (a Windows version is promised, currently in a free beta period, that allows you to take multiple screenshots, annotate them, and combine them into a single document. This creates an easy-to-follow set of instructions for just about any task.

The easiest way to show what Clarify can do is with an example. I…

February 8, 2011, 3:00 pm

Taking Screenshots on Windows with Greenshot

By Mark Sample

The other day a student needed help embedding a YouTube video onto our class blog. Within seconds I had taken a screenshot of the WordPress New Post toolbar, circled the appropriate icon, pasted the image into an email, and sent it off to the student. Immediately afterward I realized that the tool I had used—Greenshot—was worth sharing with ProfHacker readers.

Unlike Macs, Windows has never had robust screen capture abilities built right into the operating system. Windows 7 includes the little known Snipping Tool, which allows you to capture portions of your screen, but Snipping Tool doesn’t run in the background (i.e. you have to open it every time you want to use it) and it offers only limited post-capture editing capabilities (you can highlight or draw freehand on a portion of the screen-captured image).

Greenshot, on the other hand, resides quietly in your desktop tray, and…

September 21, 2009, 8:12 am

Screengrabs, screenshots, screencasts and more

By Jason B. Jones

One of the things that’s . . . interesting about working with, say, wikis or blogs is that such work often isn’t formally supported by your local IT. They’ve got enough to do with viruses and e-mail snafus and Blackboard/Vista problems, that they can’t explain to the student how to log in to some third-party wiki provider. You need to provide those instructions, and you need to make them as simple as possible.

Step-by-step written instructions are nice, but there’s something comforting about grabbing a screenshot of whatever site you’re using. And if you can mark it up? Well! And if you can make a movie of it–even better. And “clearer instructions” are only one benefit of showing screenshots or screencasts.

This series will look at lots of different tools for getting what’s on your screen out into the world.

We’re going to start with Skitch, which is a dreamy little app for capturing,…