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.