Andy is a secondary school teacher. He has an excellent rapport with his students and goes to great lengths to ensure they enjoy and understand their lessons. Like most forward thinking teachers he enjoys compiling his own lesson plans and materials for the classroom. He prefers to use Word to create supplementary learning materials as this gives him more control over following legible styles set out in educational guidelines.

He uses Word to create handouts for his pupils so that they can take something away at the end of a lesson - this reinforces learning and is an ideal aid to revision. All Andy's students are well versed in independent research. But, for Andy, it's not simply a case of writing down a web address and hoping that the pupils will hit the right site when they log on in their own time; Andy needs to be sure that the pupils will get to the right section on the site, and it's crucial that he gives them accurate and detailed guidance.

Andy wants to be able to guide pupils onto safe, reliable sites. As anyone in a learning environment knows, the Internet can be an invaluable tool to leaning. The Internet lets people express themselves, communicate with others, and exchange ideas. The Web can provide information for researching many topics. But what many students forget is that it's easy and inexpensive to put any content on the Web. It's important that anyone using the Internet remembers to evaluate carefully whatever they find. The onus is usually on the student to establish the validity, authorship, timeliness and integrity of any information they source via the Internet. However, they have to learn that documents can easily be copied and falsified or copied with omissions and errors - intentional or accidental. Some website content may not have been checked for spelling and grammar, far less factual errors.

Even within school, university and library websites, there are many pages that can't be monitored. Students need to learn that they should use the Internet to assist in research, but at the same time they need to cultivate the habit of healthy scepticism, of questioning everything they find with critical thinking.

For this reason, Andy prefers to use a screen grab of a site he wants to recommend. By using a screenshot, Andy ensures that his students have the correct visual reference to what they need to look at.

Now, with Word 2010, Andy can insert screenshots quickly and professionally without using any other program. One of the new features in Word 2010 is the ability to take screenshots and paste them directly into his documents, allowing Andy to create materials much quicker.

It's simple to select an available screenshot of an open window. To do this, make sure that the window you want to grab a screenshot of is not minimised. Then open Word 2010. From within your Word document, go to the Ribbon and select the Insert tab; then, in the Illustrations section, click Screenshot. Select the thumbnail representing the window you wish to capture. The screen capture will be inserted into your document, where you can resize it to meet your needs.

After adding the screenshot, Andy can use the tools on the Picture Tools tab to edit and enhance the screenshot. And when he wants to reuse screenshots across documents, he can take advantage of the Paste Preview feature to see what his additions will look like before he drops them in.

The new Screenshot feature in Word 2010 means that Andy can take screenshots using Word, without having to use additional software. He can even automatically grab a screenshot of an open window or highlight the specific area he needs to capture.

There are times, for example, when he also needs to show the pupils a specific example of what they have been studying in class. In previous versions of Word, Andy could grab a screen image (or print screen) and paste this into his document, but these images never looked inspiring - and they did not stimulate any interest for further learning. Now, there's no more distracting, unwanted areas of the screenshot and you don't have to use another application to crop - it's all done within Word.

If you want to highlight a specific area and capture it, once you have selected a screenshot, simply select Screen Clipping. There will be a transparent haze that covers the screen; navigate to the area you want a shot of, then hold down the left mouse button and highlight the area. Use your mouse to frame the area you want to capture. The captured area will be inserted into your document. Again, it's placed into your Word document immediately and you can continue editing it if you need to.

This is a handy new feature that should allow you to create documents much faster. You won't need to worry about buying and configuring a new program to get your screenshots into a document.

If, like Andy, you want to make sure that your web references are accurate and reliable, as well as having a professional finish, it's worth finding out more about working with the Screenshot tools in Word 2010.