Power of Skitch

  Skitch is a great app that I can see many practical uses in the classroom. Skitch is an annotation app that allows you to draw or write over the top of various images. What makes this unique from other apps like Showme is that it has come built in tools that are very useful. Amongst the images you can draw on include: photos (from the camera roll), live pictures, screenshots, webpages, maps (from google earth I believe), and of course your own creation.  What's even better is that these new images then are put directly back into your camera roll for future use--whether that is keynote, pages, photo editors, etc....  Finally, this app will sync into you Evernote if you an account!  (There are several Evernote tools worth looking into if I ever get going on that.)

Some of the immediate uses I can see are:

•  To take a still shot of the materials used for an experiment and then use the text feature to label each of these items.  You can also insert an arrow to point them out.
• What about pulling up a map of where your animal lives, zoom in, and circle the territory or use a wider map to draw the migration patterns of your animal.
• Draw the route a famous explorer took for history class.
• Create a diagram (i.e.  food chains, webs, cycles, cause and effects, force diagrams, etc...) from images on the net or draw your own images
• What about a photo scavenger hunt (i.e.  simple machines, geometric shapes, slope, angles, classification systems, everyday uses of math in the real world, get to know me games, etc...) in which you need to label, draw attention to, etc.
• What if you have a picture you need to quickly crop for a project!

Although I like this app a lot, it doesn't allow you to add audio like ShowMe and other interactive whiteboards like ScreenChomp, and Educreations. The advantage here is that it goes directly into the camera roll.  The others have to be emailed out or linked using a hyperlink.