Friday, January 17, 2014

Teaching with Jing


Guest Blogger:  William Donohue

My blog post this week is a demonstration of the screencast software called Jing.  This software enables a user to take video of their computer screen and record audio. I have used it to enhance communication with students in my composition classes to further explain assignments or feedback on student writing.

Click here to view my Jing demonstration:
http://screencast.com/t/sfv4csXP6
 
How have you used screencast software? What would you use it for?  What other similar programs exist? 
If you are interested in trying it out, you can download the free Jing software at http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html.

3 comments:

  1. Interesting. Thanks!

    I have not used any screencast software; but I am aware of others such as EZVid, Screencast-O-Matic and Screenr; and there are reviews at Mashable, Premiumbeat and Lifehacker.

    Safro Kwame

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  2. Bill, thank you so much for that creative blog! It gave me a new tool to consider for my distance ed course as well as for my work in our online tutoring center. Normally I just email papers back and forth with comments inserted (as you showed), but I suspect that adding a voice-over video highlighting the main issues the student needs to work on would get my points across much more effectively.

    Up till now I've only used Jing to do things like narrating PowerPoints to post on the web for student use (Example) but hadn’t thought about using it as part of a paper review. The five-minute limit on the free version, while sometimes an annoyance, would probably be a virtue, because it would force me to focus on only the main issues and deliver feedback in a quantity that students would most likely be willing to hear and able to retain.

    I would love to hear about what other uses you have found and how other people use this kind of tool, whether Jing or the other software Kwame has mentioned. It really does open up new options for reaching students who learn best by hearing and seeing rather than by reading especially as more and more education is being done in hybrid or distance modalities.

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  3. Jing is wonderful for short instructional videos. I created several D2L tutorials using Jing. Here is a sample of one:

    http://www.lincoln.edu/d2l/faculty/QG-Videos/createamodule.swf

    Other ideas are: screen capture images, a short introduction to your class, record announcements, introduce the week’s topics and/or assignments, and how-to videos.

    If you have a headset with a microphone, this will cut down on the background noise.

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