Protect Student Privacy by Using Skitch

In yesterday's post about creating digital records of physical items I mentioned using Skitch to take pictures and annotate them. One of the things about Skitch that I failed to mention in that post is that along with drawing and typing on a picture you can crop and blur items in a picture.

You can use the Skitch mobile apps (Android and iOS) and the Skitch desktop apps (Mac and Windows) to crop any image that you have saved. Likewise all four versions of the app have an option to blur items in a picture. To blur something simply select the blurring tool and start scribbling on the item you want to blur out. Both the cropping and blurring tools are useful when you have a picture of a classroom activity that you want to share without sharing faces of your students. The blurring tool is also useful when you want to share exemplars of students' work without revealing the names of the students who created the work.

Skitch 2.0 - Available For All iOS Devices and More

Skitch is one of my favorite drawing and image annotation apps for iPad and Android. Many people love using it on the Macs too. Today, Evernote (owners of Skitch) announced that now Skitch is available for iPhone and iPod touch.

In addition to the announcement that Skitch can now be used on all iOS devices, Evernote announced some other new features of Skitch 2.0. Now that Skitch is fully integrated into Evernote all of your Skitch projects are automatically synched to your Evernote account making your drawings available to you any time you connect to the web. Skitch 2.0 has a new tool for pixelating parts of an image.

Applications for Education
The pixelation feature could be obscuring faces in pictures that you post online. If you have pictures of classroom activities that you want to post on your blog but you don't want students' faces to be seen, use the pixelation tool to obscure them.

For more ideas on using Skitch as a teaching tool, check out Skitch as a Teaching Tool.

Important Changes Coming to Skitch

Skitch is a great tool for creating images, drawings, and marking-up images. I have Skitch installed on my iPad and on my Android tablets. Last winter Skitch was acquired by Evernote. That acquisition made it easy to store my Skitch images in Evernote. Last night I learned through this Evernote email that soon all Skitch image storage and sharing will have to go through Evernote.

Starting on October 10 the Skitch.com website will be archived and you'll no longer be able to sign into it to access your images. If you have images in it now, download them while you still can. And if you don't have an Evernote account already, you'll need one in order to store your future Skitch creations online.

Applications for Education
Students can use the Skitch iPad and Android apps to create drawings from scratch to use in multimedia projects. Or have students use Skitch to annotate images to explain what they're seeing. Take your students on a nature walk with a list of plants that they need to try to recognize. Tell them to use their tablets to take pictures of the plants then draw or write on the images to point out the identifying aspects of those plants.

Playing With Skitch for Android

Did you know that Skitch, the popular Mac application for screen captures and drawings, has an Android app too? I recently learned about it myself through a TechCrunch article announcing that the app had been downloaded 3 million times in less than four month. I gave Skitch for Android a try this afternoon. I love it.

The first thing you should know about Skitch is that it is now owned by Evernote. So anything you create on Skitch for Android can be saved in your Evernote account. And when you log into the Skitch website you can do so with an Evernote account or a Skitch account credentials. Drawings you create Skitch can also be saved in your Google Docs account, Picassa album, sent to email, or Tweeted from your Android tablet or Android phone.

There are three ways that you can use Skitch for Android. You can create a drawing from scratch. Capture and image with your Android tablet or Android phone. Or you can use alter an image that you have saved in an Evernote or Picassa album. Whichever method you choose to start with the set of drawing tools is the same. You can drawing free-hand, type text, crop images, draw arrows, and highlight and move elements that you have drawn. The saving and sharing options are the same regardless of which method you employ to create your images.

Applications for Education
If your school has Android tablets for your students, Skitch for Android is an app you should try. Students can use the app to create drawings from scratch to use in multimedia projects. Or students could use Skitch to annotate images to explain what they're seeing. I'm thinking that it could be neat to take students on a nature walk with a list of plants that they need to try to recognize. Have students take along an Android tablet or Android phone to capture pictures of the plants when they see them and write captions for each image.