Jing
What’s Jing? Jing is my new favourite application. It is, as are many Techsmith products, simple and focused. No extraneous features or extra buttons; it just does what it does.
So what does it do? It’s a free application that works as an excellent screen recorder; either video or a still image. It sits in a very tidy manner at the very top of your screen like so:
When you click on the unobtrusive circle you given the option to Capture or look at your History. The History option will bring up your Library; Jing will record every capture you’ve made and its current location. The second point there, location, is important… and we’ll get back to that in a bit.
The capture software gives you the option of a still image or video. The video is a fairly basic recorder but often-times that’s all you need. It will produce something like what you can link to below (note that all the images and videos in this post are recorded using Jing and hosted by Screencast… WordPress unfortunately will not accept embedded video from Jing so just click to follow the link instead). What I’ve recorded is a brief run-through of the annotation tools available for a still image. In this example, let’s say I’m giving an introduction to the tools in Photoshop. Audio can be included but I’ve decided not to.
Click here to see an example of Jing video on the screencast website
Lastly, I mentioned how important the location was to note. This is, in my opinion, where Jing excels. The biggest issue we find people have with online video is not how to record but where it goes. Jing will allow you to save any capture locally (the swf video comes with a player built into the file) but it will also upload any files to Techsmiths free hosting service called Screencast. You can also use it to FTP to any site or to upload to Flickr or YouTube. All very very useful. The free hosting service has a limit of 2GB of space and 2GB bandwith p/m usage but that’s more than enough for you to start making a library of short rough-and-ready content for your learners.
Lastly it also publishes a paragraph of HTML so you easily embed content into another location, for example your VLE course area.