Jing and basic screencasting

Jing

Today we had a look at screencasting technology. In particular, we discovered a program called Jing.

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Jing is a freeware tool that allows you to snap pictures of your screen (or part of it) or record it. A nice plus is the chance to draw arrows/underline etc which is totally awesome and saves lots of time when giving feedback on a single image or simple item or we want to draw attention on details/parts of the screen quickly.

The main perk is that it is extremely easy to use and I recommend it as a first step if you don't have any experience in screencasting. You can download it for free here:

Download Jing

For being a free tool, Jing is a decent program. There are some serious limits to what you can do with your screencasts though. The first one concerns video storage: the finished videos are all physically stored in a server in the US and they are accessible provided we request a link. This is easily done but it's not the same as having the actual video stored on our computer or elsewhere.

The second problem is editing: you cannot add any animations/effects to the recorded video, which is something that really comes handy when/if you want to draw particular attention to something on the screen and you really want to do something different from moving the cursor around.

The perfect tool to flip your classroom

There are a number of possible applications of this technology. I will probably go for the most natural of all, that is deliver some of the "teaching stuff" online. In a word, I will use Jing to flip part of my classroom, especially those lessons that require a lot of teacher talking and learning from the students. All that, thanks to this technology, can happen away from the classroom. My students can listen to me explaining for example a grammar topic and then come to class just to ask for clarification, to confront themselves with their peers, to practice the language and really get their hands dirty.