Tag Archives: WorkFlowy

Half a dozen folks showed up to talk about screencapture software, the theme of the day. Here are the tools we focused on:

Maxthon Browser

• Ryan demo’d the “Snap” function in Maxthon that lets you take screenshots and then annotate them
• Nice features: free; lots of annotation options; color picker; gives you dimensions of screenshot as you draw rectangle around area you want to capture; can be shared across your Maxthon account if you have the browser set up on other devices (other computers, phones, tablets, etc.)

SnagIt

• Stephen showed how SnagIt works for capturing screenshots and for uploading them, if desired, to a free account at screencast.com. Although it isn’t free, there is education pricing available that brings to the cost down from the retail.
• Nice features: easy uploading of annotated screenshots to screencast.com; captures video as well; extensive annotation options

Greenshot

• Frank spoke about his use of Greenshot, a free and open source tool for capturing screenshots
• Nice features: open source! free; lots of annotation options

Windows Snipping Tool

• Stephen mentioned that all Windows machines running Windows 7 or 8 come with a free screencapture tool from Microsoft. You can find it on your office computers  (go to the Start menu and in the search box, begin typing “snipping” until the program icon appears)
• Nice features: already installed on all library PCs

Microsoft Office’s “screenshot” command

• Jessica said that she’s found the “insert a screenshot” command in Word to be really useful. Ryan mentioned that he uses that command in PowerPoint. As it turns out, it is also available in Outlook when you are composing email messages and in Excel, too.
• Nice features: once you take the screenshot, you have all the drawing and annotation tools built into Microsoft Windows at your fingertips for editing and marking up the screenshot

Uses for Screenshots

• handouts
• documentation
• blog posts
• tutorials and how-to’s (especially in LibGuides)
• to embellish support tickets you submit
• for students you are helping in reference interactions (especially in chat and email)

Best Practices for Screenshots

• create a system for archiving screenshots on your computer, as it is likely you’ll want to re-use them
• find a way to host them on the web in a way that allows them to be shared via a unique URL (if you’re not using SnagIt, which comes with online hosting of your images, consider setting up an account at imgur or flickr)

To Do Lists and Notetaking Systems

We started talking about software and websites for managing to-do lists and then about ways to keep notes about literature you’re reading. Here are the things that came up in that conversation:

Workflowy

• Free website and app for to-do lists (recommended by Jessica)

Evernote

• Free software, website, and apps for keeping notes (recommended by Stephen)
• Nice features: you can publish a note or a notebook to the web so that others can see it

OneNote

• Free software and from Microsoft that rivals Evernote in many respects (recommended by??? if you recall, add a note in the comments to this post)

Zim

• Free desktop wiki software (recommended by Frank)

Ideas for Future Tech Sharecase Meetings

• Citation management software (Zotero, Mendeley, etc.) and storing notes on what you’ve been reading
• Managing to-do lists
• Alt-metrics