We have SMARTBoards at school and one of the new features of Notebook 9.5 is the lasso screen capture feature. Just click on the camera icon on the toolbar.
In our newspaper work we have been looking at the differences between direct and reported speech. A simple activity that involved the screen capture tool was that we went to the Newsround website and scanned news stories for examples of the different speech. A child then chose the lasso capture tool and lassoed (!) the part of the text, this is then captured into the notebook software and we sorted it into a table.
I have also used this tool in the past when exploring shapes in a photograph (like of railings) the children can draw around the shapes they see – these are then captured to Notebook. It is then possible to sort the shapes into different groups, triangles, quadrilaterals etc because the clipping retains the properties from the photo. In the past you could only do a square around the shape so it was more difficult to organise them after they are captured via their properties.
Here is a movie (WMV) from the Steljes site of the tool in action.