Capturing screenshots can be very useful if we are doing the following:
- Creating a how to document on using a computer application and the need to illustrate the procedures
- Creating a presentation about some online resources and showing how they look (assuming that we don't have an Internet connection during the presentation)
- Getting some frames from a video (for example, a DVD or a Web-based video)
- Keeping records of webshots (website screenshots) that we find interesting, in order to post on our blog or in Moodle (for example, a portfolio of some websites that we have developed)
We can take screenshots in one of the following ways:
- Using the Print Screen function supported by the majority of computers (and keyboards) to capture the entire screen or a specific application window
- Using GIMP
- Using Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) to directly capture a region of the screen (and insert callouts on it, such as the screenshots used in this book)
The first technique is fairly easy, we just have to hit the Print Screen key, or in a Mac, command + shift + 3, and save the file in our Desktop. So, let's start with the second technique, that is, using GIMP.
In the final course module, to wrap up we will require students to create a digital portfolio of their best works from the course. This will involve capturing screenshots of some of the products of the course and later creating a narrated video where they have to comment on these screenshots (we will see how to create these narrated videos in Chapter 5, Understanding Web-based Applications and Other Multimedia Forms). For now, we will look at an example of a screenshot of an online map that students have to build in Module 1, Music evolves, showing the location of some instruments on a world map and some of its characteristics.
The steps for a screen capture are as follows:
- Prepare the window on the desktop that we want to capture. In this case, it will be a browser window opened on our map.
- Open GIMP, go to File | Create | Screenshot, and select the option Take a screenshot of a single window.
An image window will open, containing the captured screenshot that we can now edit and save. We should then export it to save it in a proper image format to use in Moodle.
The captured screenshot will look similar to the following screenshot:
In both cases, there are some issues that we should consider before taking a screenshot. One of the first things we need to bear in mind is that if we want to use the screenshot in a web page or document, it should have an appropriate size. For this, we should reduce the window sizes and elements that we want to capture and fit them to standard sizes adequate to our medium, minimizing all of the empty space and increasing the letter size if necessary. To have a look at copyright issues concerning screenshots, refer to Chapter 8, Common Multimedia Issues in Moodle.
Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) is a screen capture software application that allows us to take screenshots (like some shown in this book) and screen videos (with our own voice), for example, explaining procedures for a piece of software. These desktop recordings are usually called screencasts (and we will see how to make them in Chapter 4, Video) and can be made in both Mac and Microsoft Windows (sorry Linux users, you can find several alternatives such as vnc2swf, xvidcap, recordmydesktop, and so on). After installing and running it, we can access it through a "sunny" interface that we can access and move anytime and anywhere on the desktop.
To start capturing the screen, the first thing to do is to click on the left-most button (after positioning the mouse pointer over the sun) and then selecting the region of the screen or application window that we want to capture. When we do this, the frame around the area to capture has a small menu on its bottom-left corner (refer to the following screenshot) with the options Image, Video, Redo selection, and Cancel.
Clicking on the Image button reveals some of the advantages of Jing over the previous technique. The first one is that it allows us to comment directly on the captured image, giving us a set of tools to do it.
To cancel a capture, we just need to press the right mouse button or select something and then click on the Cancel button. Once we have selected an area to capture, we can save it by clicking on the Save button (the second from the left) in the publishing options below the captured area. Note that we can publish the screenshots directly to our Flickr account (for example) by adding a customized button (click on the last button in the publishing options and explore).
One of Jing's limitations is that if we take a capture, comment it, and save it; we cannot correct or change what we did in the exported file. So we will have to create a new commented screenshot.