Blog #4- App Review

The Sitch on Skitch

Being that I am new to most of these apps I am speaking as a novice.  But I have been playing with Skitch since we learned of it in class and I love it!  There have been many times that I wished I could save a portion of an image on a website and Skitch enables you to do it so easily. And I’ve also wanted to learn how people make annotations on pictures and images for purposes of direction and/or instruction and to literally point things out.  Now I am able to do that very thing.

Features:

• It is user friendly
• All the buttons for features are visible on the screen surrounding your picture so you don’t have to go back and forth
• Many font choices, sizes, and colors
• Can share the screenshot URL as a direct image URL, HTML, HTML thumbnails, or forum code.
• Can make multiple copies of the screenshot and “wipe” each to make changes
• Saves right into Evernote
• Best part… it is compatible with Mac so I can use it on my computer as well as the IPAD! 

Application for Education:

I can see how easily this could be applied in the classroom for live instruction, in making handouts, for use in a video or virtual instruction such as Prezi, etc.  It is a very intuitive app, which makes it easy to get going and begin using right away. Being that you can save the image once and make multiple copies, you can easily make minor changes each time to show progressive points on that same image. The features, like colors and sizes, are simple and therefore more noticeable.

There are so many ways I could have used this in my music teaching days. I could have scanned a sheet of music and pointed out the lines on the staff that each part is singing, made note of the dynamics as they are written, and highlight Codas, just to name a few. There are so many wonderfully practical ways to apply this app to teaching!