Capturing an image of your screen as you see it at a particular moment in time can serve a lot of purposes in a school setting. You can use screenshots, particularly annotated screenshots, to show students where to click on a page. You can use a series of screenshots to show students the steps necessary to use a program like Scratch or Thunkable. And from time to time you might need to capture a screen image to preserve an email or social media post that you need to discuss with a student. If you’re a Chromebook user, the following three tools make it easy to capture a screen image.


Nimbus Screenshot & Video Recorder
This is currently my favorite option for capturing screen images on a Chromebook. I use it more than any other option because it also offers an excellent, high resolution screencast video creation tool. Nimbus Screenshot lets you capture images of a section of a page or screen or an entire screen. A “select & scroll” option lets you capture an image that is longer than what you can see in your web browser. In other words, if you need to capture an entire webpage in one image, you can do that with the “screen & scroll” option in Nimbus Screenshot. You can draw and type on the images you capture with Nimbus Screenshot.

Capture, Explain and Send Screenshots
This extension requires fewer permissions than any other screenshot extension in the Chrome store. You can connect it to your Google Drive account to have all of your screenshots instantly uploaded to Drive. Once those screenshots are saved in Drive you could easily share them with your students in Google Classroom. Capture, Explain and Send Screenshots will let you capture part of a page or all of a page. All of your screenshots can be annotated with text and drawings.

Awesome Screenshot
Awesome Screenshot is the Chrome extension for screenshots that I’ve had installed longer than any other on this list. With Awesome Screenshot you can to capture a page or region on a page, draw boxes, draw lines, blur out information, and add text to your screenshot. When you’re satisfied with your screenshot you can save it locally, save it to Google Drive, or share it via the URL provided by Awesome Screenshot. “Delayed capture” is one of the neat features of Awesome Screenshot that is not found in the other tools in this list. “Delayed capture” lets you select a portion of your screen and move things around a little bit before the image is actually captured.

At the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp we’ll cover lots of little tips and tricks like how to capture screenshots as well as dive into bigger ideas about teaching with Chromebooks. Earlier registration discounts are available now.