Keep Content Awesome!!

Create
images
with
Google Keep

and Awesome Screenshot

Sometimes the biggest barrier to integrating tech into the classroom is time. Part of the challenge is also ease of use, both of the tools can take a few uses to get the hang of them, but are worth the few minutes in the long run.

Here a few suggestions to try.

“We do know that when our eyes our open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain – a full 2 billion of the 3 billion firings per second – which was the finding of neuroanatomist R.S. Fixot in a paper published in 1957 (from blogpost https://www.imagethink.net/true-or-false-vision-rules-the-brain/).” This fact alone should make all educators utilize visuals as often as possible. This is not always do easy to do with the limited time educators have to prepare. So, I thought I might highlight a couple of great tools that make it pretty quick and easy to create an image and insert it into a digital tool.

First thing to do is get Awesome Screenshot from the Google Web Store and connect it to your Chrome Web Browser. The tool allows you to take a picture of your desktop, web page or select an area. There is a screen-recording tool and delayed capture for free and more tools available if you purchase the pro version. OK, so next…capture a photo.

When you capture an image you get a very versatile set of editing tools that allow you to do many things (draw, circle, type text, etc.) or just download the png or connect and save the image to your Google Drive. You can then insert the png into any slide or website (or anything that allows png uploads). You can also make it a background of a slide or web page by taking a few simple steps when selecting an image for the background of a slide.

Google Keep provides some similar opportunities and a few different. You can add any photos or text from Keep to Docs, Sheets, or Slides. The capability I use the most (other than making lists) is capturing, editing and inserting photos. If you haven’t noticed that you can access Google Keep in a small panel on the right hand side of your Google Doc, Sheets, and Slides, check it out.-

Once you click on the Keep icon and your Keep notes open up, click on the three dots in the upper right corner and you should see insert in Doc, Sheet, Slides depending on which application you are using. This is all great…but what about creating an image?? You have a couple of choices. You can open keep and take a photo or insert an image from your computer or drive. This isn’t the cool thing that I like.

Once you have an image in Keep, you can draw on it!! Very cool, right!! You can also draw a picture on a blank page or add dots, a grid or lines to write on. Take a look at the images below to see how to access these tools. Now, once you create your image in keep you can use Awesome Screenshot to take a picture and create a png or add the image to a slide and download it as a png for future use. It’s up to you!! Have fun!!