Many good suggestions in the comments this week. Unfortunately, all these tools have a learning curve so I tend to stick with what works for me. An exception is the “Snipping Tool,” which I didn’t know existed. I’ve used PrtSc for many, many years to capture a screenshot and then pasted it in Paint, where I had to crop the image. Snipping eliminates a step or two and I’ve already been using it this week. Paint offers a few more options but for speed and simple tasks, I like the Snipping Tool.
I haven’t tried Prezi because I find the jumping around and zooming in/out to be distracting as a viewer. Perhaps there’s a way to simplify it but, for now, it’s not something I’m going to take the time to master because I don’t see a real need for it and I don’t particularly care to watch most of the types of presentations I’ve seen using Prezi.
Earlier this week, another instructor asked me about adding banners to Blackboard so I used that as my subject for a video using Screencast-o-matic. Here’s how to add a custom banner to your Blackboard Home Page in two minutes. (If your entry point to Blackboard is your Announcements page or something other than the default Home Page, then you have add your custom banner via the Teaching Style option under Customization in the Control Panel, which most of you using Bb already know.)
As a final observation, I’ve been surprised that even though most of our students have grown up in the digital age using computers, smart phones and social media, many of them don’t really have a lot of technical computer skills. Therefore, I try to keep my class websites simple, without too many new tools for students to learn that may distract them from the course material itself.
