Jing Review
URL: https://www.techsmith.com/jing.html
Jing is a free service from the same company that makes Camtasia Studio. Jing captures images and videos from the computer screen and gives you the option to upload it to the company’s free image and video hosting site, screencast.com.
Here’s a link to a video I captured using the service from history.com: http://screencast.com/t/nuc0vNey
The service itself is a snap to set up and it ran on my computer without draining resources. It is available for both Mac and PC, and it doesn’t try to install any sneaky extra software, although it does advertise the company’s other products. However, there are limits to the software. One, there is no editing capability for video captures, so if you mess up, you have to start from the beginning (Jing advertises that if you want to edit, you can install Camtasia Studio, which is not free). Two, the file saves as a swf file, which is a Flash file, and which doesn’t play automatically in Windows Media Player or on iPads and iPhones. So before using it, make sure you have a program installed on your device that can play swf files. Three, uploading the video I captured to screencast.com took over 30 minutes. So although the screen capture process itself didn’t take long, be aware that if you want to share the link to your video, you need to add in a decent chunk of time to upload.
Since Jing can be used to make quick screen-capture tutorials (5 minutes max), I think this resource would be great to make classroom how-to videos, especially for things like searching academic databases for journal articles, or using other web-based resources. My placement school is very rural, so its internet connection can be very unreliable. This service would allow me to capture back-ups of videos I planned to use in class in case the network went down.
Jing is a free service from the same company that makes Camtasia Studio. Jing captures images and videos from the computer screen and gives you the option to upload it to the company’s free image and video hosting site, screencast.com.
Here’s a link to a video I captured using the service from history.com: http://screencast.com/t/nuc0vNey
The service itself is a snap to set up and it ran on my computer without draining resources. It is available for both Mac and PC, and it doesn’t try to install any sneaky extra software, although it does advertise the company’s other products. However, there are limits to the software. One, there is no editing capability for video captures, so if you mess up, you have to start from the beginning (Jing advertises that if you want to edit, you can install Camtasia Studio, which is not free). Two, the file saves as a swf file, which is a Flash file, and which doesn’t play automatically in Windows Media Player or on iPads and iPhones. So before using it, make sure you have a program installed on your device that can play swf files. Three, uploading the video I captured to screencast.com took over 30 minutes. So although the screen capture process itself didn’t take long, be aware that if you want to share the link to your video, you need to add in a decent chunk of time to upload.
Since Jing can be used to make quick screen-capture tutorials (5 minutes max), I think this resource would be great to make classroom how-to videos, especially for things like searching academic databases for journal articles, or using other web-based resources. My placement school is very rural, so its internet connection can be very unreliable. This service would allow me to capture back-ups of videos I planned to use in class in case the network went down.