Creating iPad Tutorials with Skitch & SnapGuide

Create a New Apple ID

Our 1:1 iPad trial is starting soon, more on that another time. I’m determined that devices will be self-managed by staff and students alike, and training time is at a premium. Our Digital Leaders will be doing lots of the work for me but I wanted a way to put together easy to follow tutorials and have found a nice solution.

Two apps free needed, Skitch and Snap Guide.

First job is to follow through whatever procedure you’re explaining on the iPad and snap a screenshot of every stage (press the power and home buttons at the same time). Then head over into Skitch and load up the pics from the Camera Roll, add any arrows, highlights etc that you want to, and export each finished image back to the Camera Roll.

Then fire up Snap Guide, add a step and select camera, select the camera roll and you can then tick each picture that you’ve created in Skitch. Get them in the right order and add a caption to each.

And that’s it! The guides look best in the free Snap Guide app which I’ll be getting everyone to install but they can also be viewed on the website. Here’s my first effort.

I think with any big change in tools in the classroom it’s important to model best practice, so I’ll be looking to provide examples of suitable iPad only solutions to all sorts of things as we go along.

ReBlog: Don't Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)

minimalmac:

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

So, today I recorded a future episode of the podcast about this very theme (before I saw this post). I’m a happy paying user of Pinboard, one that even pays the extra money for the archiving feature. Not only do I believe this idea to be true but, as I announce in that upcoming show, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by sending, anonymously, cash to a service I use and love daily that has no outward discernible business model.

Here is my idea:

What if, 1% of the users of a particular free service of 36 million clients and growing, were to decide to drop $10.00 cash every month into an envelope and mail it to said service? What if that envelope had no return address? Perhaps there was an note inside that begged them to create a model to let us pay them to use the service. To make sure the service continued on once the bubble inevitably bursts and the VC’s take their payout and fly to the Grand Caymans.

My guess is that such a service would have to keep the money. Perhaps they would go through a couple of months of having their offices flooded with 300,000+ ten dollar bills. This might get to be a hassle so, perhaps, maybe, they finally get the hint and have a few million dollars of starting cash to launch a way for us to pay directly for this thing we use and love. 

Crazy, right? Yep.

So, here is the address I’m sending my unmarked cash with the note in the envelope with no return address.

Tumblr, Inc., 35 East 21st Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10010

I welcome those that care as much as I do to do the same.

Update: Forgot to mention, and I never ask this… Please reblog the shit out of this one.

Top