The Possibilities are Endless with Skitch!

Skitch

I have been playing and learning with Skitch for approximately a year and I wanted to share some of the ways that I have found that Skitch can help enhance education and student learning.

Skitch can be adapted to any subject or activity. It is only limited by our imaginations. Because the user can annotate over any photograph or drawing and then save the end result in an iPad's photo gallery, Skitch can take other applications to new heights. Any photo that is created in Skitch can then be used in other apps like, Educreations, Splice, Fotoflo, ShowMe, StoryKit, plus other various creation apps.

With a free Evernote account, all Skitch work will automatically be saved into a Skitch notebook within Evernote. How handy is that? Where I have found web-based storage to be the handiest is for classrooms that are sharing a cart of iPads. Once the user saves the Skitch creation, they can sign into their account and access their work on other devices or computers. Students have done very well with signing in and out of their Evernote account either using the Skitch or the Evernote app. I also work with some classrooms that have 1:1 iPads and both Evernote and Skitch have been just as useful in a 1:1 setting. Skitch is also available as software for newer computers. I am not sure of the system requirements for PCs, but for Apple you must have Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later. Evernote is browser based on a computer and can easily be accessed no matter the brand or the age of the computer.

This Skitch is a smaller part of a larger project.

Students researched all seven biomes, collected

photos from the internet, and then annotated on

the photos using Skitch. Students then saved all 

of their Skitch creations into their iPad's photo

gallery where they then put all of their photos

into an Educreations. Students then recorded

themselves talking about each of the biomes.

Lastly students posted their Educreations 

onto their blog to share with the world.

Labeling Adjectives

Using Skitch, students took a photo of an object in the classroom and then labeled all adjectives associated with the photo. Students then sent their finished Skitch to their teacher by email.

Graphing Mtn. Range Heights

In this example students took a picture 

of a worksheet, a great way to cut down

on photocopying, and then they graphed

the information according to the data

provided. Students could also do their 

own research to collect data for graphing.

My school district is in the process of customizing learning for our students. We are in the second year of implementation. This is a form that some teachers are using for students to track their learning. If we start using forms like this... potentially a lot more paper will be needed. My hope is to go digital with these types of management pieces. Skitch is one way for students to track their learning. One reason I think it may be the best solution is because Skitch and Evernote are partners. There are other apps like PaperPortNotes that allows the user to type or hand write on a .pdf or .jpeg but there is no web storage. I think that is a vital component to any management system.