Screen Capture: An Aha Moment

Image Capture Activity
Chris Ware
September 3, 2009

Ever had one of the D’oh moments like Homer Simpson? That’s about how I felt when I read about the print screen function from the link. I didn’t know it could be used to capture an image. I actually needed this function last month for a PowerPoint presentation, but was told the only way to capture what I wanted was to have a screen capture program since what I was wanting couldn’t be highlighted and copied.
I found an image on a blog of the making Fiends cartoon. My kids and my students really enjoy them as well as the podcasts. I captured the screen and placed it in Paint, then cropped out most of it. Then playing with some of the tools, I turned the picture into a decorated comic strip. I think this would be a good writing activity to use with my students. I could just imagine some of the pictures they could capture and write dialog for. They could create comic strips, political cartoons, or captions. I even made a very rudimentary speech bubble. Paint seems a little crude, but I guess you could zoom in to work in more detail.
I saved this image as a JPEG, with a file size of 49.3 KB. It opens on my computer with Windows Photo Gallery.