Grabbing logos and portions of screens for projects
I grabbed this logo from the TeachersFirst homepage and inserted it into this post. It’s not difficult to grab a portion of a screen and use it in a workBench project as well. We created a collection of teacher resources, in which logos, or portions of home pages, serve as links to the sites.
We’re not intellectual property lawyers, but our interpretation is that if we use a logo to direct people to its site for educational purposes, it is an example of the Fair Use doctrine and not in violation of copyright laws.
If you haven’t seen it, take a look at our resource collection. Click on any logo, or screen fragment, and the site will open in another window. Close that window, and you’re back to the collection to search further. (You can access the collection at www.trintuition.com/resources also.)
To grab a portion of an open screen on a Mac, hold down Shift-Apple-4. The cursor changes into cross-hairs with a circle in the middle. Drag the modified cursor over any portion of the screen that you want to grab, and when you release the drag, a picture of that section of the screen is produced. It’ll appear on your desktop. (Shift-Apple-3 will take a picture of your whole screen.)
In Mac world, with Tiger (OSX 10.4) and Leopard (OSX 10.5), the file that is created is a PNG, a type of picture file, which can be dragged into the workBench uploader as is and added to your resources and projects. With Panther (OSX 10.3), the file created is a PDF. Open it in Preview and save it as a JPG file before uploading it.
I’m not as familiar with the world of PCs, put apparently Vista has added a Snip tool that captures portions of screens. In earlier Windows operating systems, the Print Screen button (abbreviated sometimes as Prt Scr) is used to capture the entire screen, then that is cropped in a photo-editing application. Apparently you can select a window within a screen, press Alt-Print Screen, and capture only that window.
I’ve used SnagIt on a PC successfully. It isn’t free, but it has the advantage of being able to scroll down and capture a vertically-extended screen completely.
Screen snapshots could be used with younger children to create alphabet books or personal dictionaries. Older students could make resource collections for different topics similar to our teacher resources.
Here’s an example of a project that used small screen shots as links that connect ideas and terms in the text to other web resources.
Please help add to this information about capturing screen “snapshots” and interesting project ideas for their use in the comments.
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[…] (For the Building Learners Project on the TeachersFirst site, we wrote a post on grabbing portions of screens to use in workBench projects. Take a look.) […]
On a non-Vista PC, all you do to save an image from online is RIGHT click and select “Save image as.” Name it something meaningful and be sure to save where you can find it. These logos can be shared among your workBench resources, too.
As for copyright and trademark, that is a bit tricky. The best, most ethical behavior to model for your students is to ask for permission to use someone’s logo as a LINK to their site. TeachersFirst receives such requests daily. No site is crazy enough to say no, but they do “own” their trademark, so modeling the request is the right thing to show your kids. MANY sites grant blanket permission for this in their “About us” or “terms and conditions” pages. If you are not sure, use “contact the webmaster” links to submit requests. SHOW your students the responses you receive so they learn how to do this.
ANY BLP participant who wishes to include TeachersFirst’s logo as a link among your resources or in a BLP project has our permission to do so, of course…without asking further.
As far as Ron’s info on PrtScrn command in Windows, the easiest thing to do is “shoot” the screen, PASTE into a blank PowerPoint slide, crop using the crop tool (found on the Picture toolbar), then RIGHT click the cropped image and say “Save as picture.” You can choose (at the bottom of the save as box) to save it as a GIF or JPG type image. WMF does not work well. I usually choose JPG because the file sizes are smaller. This crop-the-screenshot option is great for making visual directions using non-Vista windows machines. For some reason, Microsoft does not offer the “save as picture” option in other programs besides PowerPoint. I used this no-cost option all the time before I had Snaggit. I still do, if I want to make a combined image, since any “grouped” set of graphics in PowerPoint can be saved as a “picture” this way. You can, for example, put a voice bubble (”callout” in Microsoft language) on a picture and group them to create a new “picture.” What fun!
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