The other day I was working on designing an online course and needed a program that I could create a screencast in order to show participants how to complete a task. After searching the web, I found a neat little program called Jing.
Jing is an easy to use, always available program for creating screenshots and screencasts in any program. It simply sits quietly at the top of your computer screen as a gold colored half-circle. When you want to use it, you just scroll your pointer over the half-circle and options for using the program appear.
It worked great for making a video tutorial, with audio, outlining the process of what I wanted participants to accomplish. After using it for this purpose, I started thinking about how this could be used in a classroom. I could see this being used to capture that tough concept that you outline on the board for the students, and then post it on your website for the students to review later. Or, comment on student work that has been turned in electronically. Check it out for yourself at http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ and see if you can find other uses of Jing. Don’t forget to check out the Overview Video on the site!
Chris Lohman is an instructional specialist for the eMINTS National Center.