Creating and Submitting Screen Shots for MAC

MAC OSX and Microsoft Word or Open Office

Many of your assignments may involve capturing and submitting "screen shots" (images of what you see on the screen) from web sites. There are many free utilities you can use-- which are listed at the end of this tutorial-- but in this case we will look at what you can do with just the standard MAC utility for capturing screens and Microsoft Word or Open Office.

1. Browse to and/or Create the Screen

In the following example we use Noodle Tools. We have surfed to the site and created the citation we need to submit.

To capture the window, scroll the browser window and, if necessary, resize it so that everything you want to capture is visible, as in this example using Noodle Tools:

Then press the COMMAND (apple key), SHIFT and 4 keys simultaneously on your keyboard. This will turn your cursor into a cross-hair cursor and you will click and drag to highlight the portion of the window that you want to capture. You will hear a "camera-like" snapshot sound and you will see that a .png file has been created on your desktop.

2. Open a Word Document

In order to send this to your instructor you need to put it into a file.

Open a new Microsoft Word or Open Office document go to the INSERT menu to insert a picture from a file. From here you will browse to the picture file you just created and click ok:

 

and it looks like this:

 

3. Repeat as Necessary

If your assignment calls for multiple screenshots you can keep adding them to the same document by moving the cursor below the current image and inserting the next picture:

4. Save and Submit

When you have all of the screenshots gathered together, save the Word document and submit it using the proper link in your Blackboard Class.

Note: Screen Capture tools

The built-in MAC screen capture is useful but not particularly full-featured. There are many programs which will capture the screen image and save them to a file directly so you don't have to paste them into a program like Microsoft Word. Some of them are even free: