"Snagit," for those of you that don't know, is an amazing tool by the ingenious people over at TechSmith (<-- NOTE: If you would like to download Snagit, click there!) The tool is similar to Jing - once again, if you don't know what Jing is or how to use, it is an amazing powerful tool that educators can use to manipulate images they find online - in that it allows users to take images from their computers and then edit the images, but it takes the functionalities of Jing MUCH farther.
Snagit is the tool that I used to create my entire American Pop Culture Project: Video Games. It allows you to an image, a portion of an image, or a series of images and add anything from various texts, arrows, shadows, shading effects, and more. As Educators we can use this to highlight important aspects of a picture or to point out to the students how they should view images.
Snagit also serves as a great way for students to CREATE images based on the work of others. I could not begin to count the times that I have trouble with encouraging student creativity. Often times, I hear responses like "I dont know how to draw," "I'm not creative," or "if I do that it will look stupid;" snagit has the potential to eliminate that feeling amongst students! Snagit allows the students to take work and then use a program to add their own, scaffolded artistic twists to the images. Assuming I have more computer access for my students next year, I am going to get them to use snagit. This gig is going to get great! (see what I did there? oh yea, thats the good stuff.)
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