Blue Ribbon Reviews February 2005
By Linda Lindroth

Whether you are conducting research on the stars, creating portraits for your own Hall of Presidents or constructing your science fair project, these software tools will help you make your final product a success.

SnagIt 7.0
This is a software tool that gives you complete control of all image captures on your computer. You even have the ability to save the capture in a variety of common formats. The software has three basic components: capture, edit and organize.

Capture. The capture settings let you select the mode as image, text, video or web capture. The input can be a screen, window, region, object or menu with selections for scrolling and shapes. There is also a selection that allows you to choose multiple outputs. The filters option includes color selections such as grayscale, color substitution (inverting the colors), color effects and image scale. It's even possible to add captions and borders and make it a watermark.

The software has a delayed/scheduled capture feature, which means you can set the timer for a screen capture of an image. This can also be set to capture the windows on the screen over a period of time. This could be a great tool for elapsed time experiments, snapshots of students workstations and library use.

Edit. The three main edit functions are SnagIt Editor, SnagIt Studio and a Batch Converter to group images into one file format and add effects such as watermarks, borders and drop shadows. The SnagIt Editor gives you sophisticated editing tools which are easy to use to make changes in color selection, substitution and effects.

Organize. Management of all the images is easy with this feature. SnagIt Catalog lets you collect and browse your images all in one place. The five-step "Creating A Web Page" is probably my favorite organizational option. In Step 1 you select the image files and add your title, theme and background for your web page. Step 2 locates your images and puts them in a destination folder for the web. In Step 3, the output options are set for thumbnails and file naming. In Step 4, the decision is made for image layout on the webpage and Step 5 lets you select your transition effects. SnagIt Printer Capture lets you capture anything you can send to a printer and "snag" it as an image file.

This is an incredibly comprehensive product whose drop down menus and buttons are very user-friendly. Even the photo novice will have professional looking graphics in minutes.

For more information, contact TechSmith at www.techsmith.com or call 800-517-3001. Be sure to click on the TechSmith Education link for tutorials and ideas for using SnagIt in the K-12 classroom. Win98 and higher, $39.95.

Starry Nights
Starry Night Enthusiast from Imaginova provides a "window to the universe" for stargazing at the night sky and more. This astronomy program gives your science classroom access to 2.5 million stars and 700 light years of space to study and explore - all without a telescope. This program captures the entire night sky and turns it into a desktop planetarium. The main screen is divided with the current night sky on the right and a panel to the left with the function buttons and detailed astronomy information. Starry Night displays the night sky as it looks right now, or it can go back or forward in time. You can display a local view or choose from Solar System, Stars, Constellations, Deep Space or Other.

Function buttons are used to locate objects in the sky. Options lets you change the appearance of the sky view by adding gridlines and different viewing objects. Info lets you learn more about a selected object in the sky. LiveSky lets you access Internet resources. Calendar provides dates for astronomical events.

The SkyGuide is a rich tutorial guide with multimedia tours of the universe. The interface is very similar to an Internet browser. A Click To prompt takes you to still images and movies to help you explore different topics.

This well-organized tool also has a companion book. For more information, visit www.starrynight.com or call 800-252-5417. Win/Mac $79.95

Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching Pre K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.