Snagit

I want to blog about Snagit because it's a tool I find myself using at work nearly every day. I think it's a pretty familar tool now, so perhaps it's not exactly "cutting edge" but I heart Snagit. So this is my shout out.

Snagit is a screen-capturing software that allows you to basically take a picture of whatever is on your computer screen and embed it in a document or website, email it, or use it to create a custom graphic. You can try a free trial at the link below. Licenses cost about $50.

http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

I create a lot of training materials, and my training involves technology that, frankly, is very difficult to explain. Therefore, I do a lot of in-person training so I can SHOW my colleagues how to do something rather than trying to explain in words. This would be just as useful for teachers who want to show (rather than describe) something more complex, or who want to incorporate a lot of images into their units.

Why do I love it?

It's easy to use, flexible, and makes my life much easier. I think I learned how to use the basics of Snagit in about 1 minute. I found it very intuitive.

I don't get fancy with it; I use it to capture an image of whatever it is I'm training on so I can embed it as part of my training materials or even email it to users (like a "this is how your screen should look" type of thing). Snagit creates a frame that you can place over whatever you want to capture. It's great that you can control this, because you can limit the size of what you want to caputre so you're not wasting space. Once Snagit captures the part of the screen you've selected, you can edit the image. I use the highlighting feature quite a bit, but you can also insert text, shapes (like arrows, for instance), and a few other things. This is perfect because rather than explaining something in detail, I can email someone a screenshot with key items highlighted and a few words of text like "enter student ID here". Doing this gets my point across in a very effective but simple manner.

What are the challenges?

Make sure you've brushed up on those fair-use and copyright recommendations. Snagit makes it exceedingly easy to take images from the Internet, and it's therefore also easy to step over copyright boundaries. The positive is that there are plenty of copyright-free images out there to use...so just be careful with what you are copying and how you are using it.

So thank you, Snagit. I no longer have to be on the phone saying "you know that icon thing by that other thing that's called, um, I'm not sure what it's called but it's that bigger thing near that smaller thing?" Now I can just say "let me email you a screen shot." You make my day happier.

RefWorks

RefWorks is an online research, writing, and collaboration tool. Like Diigo, it helps manage information. Can you tell I'm very interested in research and collaboration tools? Since I teach college English, the bulk of student work is spent in writing thesis-based papers and working in discussion and presentation groups, so while there may be flashier and more fun online tools out there, but I need a workhorse that delivers on helping students with research and collaboration.

RefWorks is a bit limited in that it is not free. You can check out the link and a trial here: http://www.refworks.com. I know a lot of colleges have subscriptions.

St. Thomas DOES have a subscription, so as a student you can make use of this tool for yourself. Or if you teach here, your students have free use of this great tool. You can find the RefWorks link on the UST Libraries home page (you will need to create an account ID and password to enter): https://www-refworks-com.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/Refworks/login.asp?WNCLang=false. I don't know if high schools use this, but it seems like it would be useful tool for any school where students are expected to complete rigorous research.

I completed a training session on RefWorks at the library, and I have my students also attend a training session in preparation for their final research project. RefWorks is one of those tools that make me think "why couldn't I have had this back when I was in college!" It makes collecting and organizing research so easy, and best of all it creates a bibliography for you! There are tutorials that walk users through how to use this tool, and the library staff can provide help as well, so I won't go into details of how to use it. Instead, I'll detail what I consider highlights and challenges of this tool.

Highlights:

RefWorks connects easily with online journals and materials. It's pretty easy to gather materials from online sources. In fact, it's not that different from online shopping, except here you're adding research to your "cart". I personally find it intutive to use. My students, on the other hand, had mixed reactions. Some found it really easy, others needed a little extra help.

They make it pretty easy to hand-enter reserach done off-line...you know, old-fashioned things like books! You fill in online fields to collect book or journal information (title, author, publisher, year, etc.) and RefWorks formats it and adds it to your collection. I found the hand-entering so easy that I used it quite a bit.

You can organize all your materials into different folders, and it's easy to move materials around or use them in more than one folder.

The bibliography tool is AWESOME. You just select what you want in your bibiliography, select the style in which you need it (various versions of MLA, APA, Chicago, and others...I counted there are 23 to choose from), and it will create your bibliography in the chosen style. Like magic, in maybe a minute you have something that would have taken maybe an hour to do by hand.

Challenges:

The collaboration elements of RefWorks seem limited to sharing resources. I think if I were assigning a group presentation I would use a class wiki instead, or even Diigo. RefWorks seems better suited for the creation of research papers, and not online collaboration.

While I love the bibliography tool, it does kind of eliminate the need for students to actually learn a particular style, and I'm not convinced that a basic knowledge of style elements isn't still necessary. I teach basic MLA style in my class, and I can tell that students do wonder why they need to know it when the computer just does this for them. However, I've used RefWorks twice now for my graduate education classes, and have chosen the correct APA style, and in both cases my profs have indicated there was something minor incorrect with my bibliography. So either RefWorks doesn't have the style exactly correct or my profs don't. But I have to say that I've also noticed little issues when students have submitted their RefWorks MLA-style bibliographies. So, I think the bibliography tool should be relied on in the same way one uses spell-check. With spell-check, you still need to have enough knowledge to know if something is spelled wrong because a computer cannot understand context. In the same way, I think you still need to have enough knowledge to be able to proof your bibliography for small issues. Then again, my students say I'm the "only professor" who cares about that (which I do not believe!) and my sister (also back in school) says that she doesn't need to know style because the computer does it now and her professor doesn't care if it's exactly right or not. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned in my concern for overreliance on computers, just as my grandmother insisted that my sister and I should know how to sew, even though we laughed at her: "grandma, you can just BUY clothes now". But I wish I did know how to sew now, and I still think that tools like this RefWorks bibliography are very useful...but one still shouldn't entirely rely on it. Don't neglect your own skills.

That was a bit of a tangent, and probably underlines my over-arching attitude toward online tools like this: they are great tools, but not total replacements.