Is collecting many screenshots becoming a chore?
This may or may not help you but its made my study process a lot easier when I was studying online for a qualification. During the practice tests I’ve noticed some of the questions are either unclear, ambiguous or just plain wrong, certainly a much high number than I’m happy with considering how much I’ve paid for the course. So I’ve decided my good deed would be to report these issues to the people running the course. However as the questions are random and in blocks of 125 then collating the issues by question number is not possible and doing this as well as making revision materials was becoming a huge chore. I knew there would be a better way. You can probably do this under windows too but this is how I did it under Mac OSX.
The text in the online test windows is not selectable so I’ve had to resort to screen captures. But how do you make this as easy as possible? Using Grab involves too many clicks (about 8 more than my method) and area selection is inconsistent. For some reason the built in OS keyboard shortcut to capture a screen region didn’t play well with the exam software so that was ruled out too. To capture the questions, along with the answers and explanations I use this script on my desktop:
screencapture - R 99,155,747,400 "~/Documents/screenshots/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).png"
say -r 360 -v Victoria Got it
which saves a set area of the screen as a png file for each question, triggered just by double clicking the shortcut to the script on the desktop (don’t forget to mark the script as executable!). I make sure the browser window is snapped to the side of the screen in the same place each time. The “say” command just gives me audio feedback that the capture is complete.
A second almost identical script is set to capture the duff questions into a folder called /duffquestionscreenshots/ (imaginative!) as well so I’ve got a copy of “the answer for the exam” as well as a copy for feedback.
A simple double click on either script icon creates a “revision card” in the form of a .png file saving about 8 clicks and a selection each time which, for multiple 125 question revision sessions, is great. I can view these on any of my devices (eg you could save it to a folder of google photos) and also provides a list of images to feed back to the training provider.
I also used http://snappy-app.com/ to allow me to annotate over the questions and answers, to highlight errors, omissions, ambiguities and key points for revision. The selections are resizable (unlike Grab), are borderless (unlike Grab) and can be made transparent (unlike Grab). Not only that but when created they appear “in -situ” over the top of the original which I’m sure may be a benefit. These screen captures are then included in the screen capture. I reckon I have saved over 1000 clicks so far…