Measuring screen elements in pixels

In a past life as a graphic and web designer, I often needed to know the pixal measurement of images on the screen.  If you have ever had a blog, wiki or other website, you will know that sometime size really does matter.

I used to use a pixal rule app like the ones below.  It sits above everything else, can measure horzontal and vertical in pixels, inches, picas, or centimeters.  They are free and come with a whole lot of other good features.

Mac: http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/

Windows: http://www.arulerforwindows.com

The thing is I am really lazy and opening a new application is sometimes just too much!  After some googling and luck I found a discussion on Mac OS X Hints, on measuring screen elements in pixels.  It turns out to be the simplest and effective way of measuring pixels on Apple Macs.

Use the built-in screen capture command (Cmd-Shift-4) to drag and measure the area you want to measure. Click and drag to measure it; to avoid taking a screenshot press the Escape key before letting go of the mouse button. 

I use this when embedding forms, videos, other webpages, polls etc. into tables when I have limited area on my webpage. 

I'd love to know what use you find for it.

Some useful things you can add to an Evernote note

Evernote is a website and app that stores information and synchronizes across all your devices.  It's logo is an elephant, I think they are suppose to have good memories. I don't, so it functions as a digital memory and lately as my "To Do" list and even bookmark.  

I also use it to keep photo records of student data, notes when conferencing, samples of their work; which are all easily sorted using tags and Notebooks.  I love how Evernote can scan and find text from digital copies of printed text, it's search feature makes it powerful!  I have been using the free version of Evernote for over two years and still finding new ways to use it.

Playing around with some of it's features last night, I found that JPG's and PDF's are embedded as a viewable image in the note.  The date and time stamps are useful for quick notes on the go and the audio notes with a note are so easy to use, I'm thinking running records, oral assessments...  Another amazing feature I found is you can embed a Pages document in a note which shows as a button; click on it and a mini window opens showing the content, nice.

If you use Evernote then get another free app from the family; Skitch.  Skitch allows you to annote any image then share it or make it as a note in Evernote, which can be tagged and allocated to any notebook.

Evernote and Skitch are on all my devices and I am only starting to tap into their possibilities.

What happens if we give these tools to our students?