Jing

Last year when I was doing The Arts and Health & Phys Ed units externally we had to do a power point presentation in our groups. One of my group members was studying EDN 113 at the time, and kept coming up with we should use Jing, skype, this and that! At the time we all laughed at him because none of us knew what he was talking about however our presentation was put together with him using Jing and how lucky we were that he had this expertise. Now it is my turn to get out of comfort zone and explore. 

So what is Jing you ask?  Jing is a free program that allows you to take screenshots (a photo of what you have on your computer screen)  and you can add arrows, text and highlight on the page to your screen capture then you can share them with someone else straight away.  I did this in my assignment 1b where I was writing instructions on how to sign up for Flicker.com. I took a screenshot as I was signing up myself then I used the tools to make it a visual tool for the reader to follow. By using the arrows and text box I was able to give direction and brief instruction that stood out on the page. 

Jing can also be used to record screencasts where you can make your own video's up to 5 minutes long. I have not ventured into this yet but am looking forward to exploring. I have had the opportunity to look at some fellow students work on the LMS discussion board and am so impressed at what they have produced...more so because some have actually produced help video's to answer fellow students problems. How good is this that people who have probably never even heard of these tings before are now using them to help others.  

I like this idea as you can create a video using Jing and then have it on file to use over and over. We are utilising these on the Companion website where Jenni Parker seems to have made one for every possible problem we come across! I read the Jing customer stories on the Jing web page and was so impressed to read of the time saving aspect of using Jing. There is an article about a school librarian who was introduced to Jing and she went away and taught herself in 30 minutes how to make a video tutorial for her weekly classes where she teaches many classes the same things. She now puts links to these tutorials on the library website  and any student or teacher can access them for themselves. 

I can see the benefits of doing this for myself as a teacher as i would be able to make tutorials that we as a class can watch together and it would give me the time to be able to monitor the students understanding and be able to be on hand to help more.

Check out the Jing Features page to see a bit more about this and check out the Jing screensaver I created to go with this blog! I'm on the way to better things.