Tech Tips Tuesday

This week's tip: Jing's the Thing

I've been meaning to learn how to capture a computer tutorial for quite some time, but thought it would be tricky so kept putting it off. Podcasting took me a while to get the hang of, so I figured I'd need to set aside some decent time to learn how to create a screencast. NOT SO! With Jing it is one of the easiest things you can do online.

Getting Started
Go to Jing and choose your system for download. It should start downloading immediately. Accept the terms of condition and install the program. It will also ask you to create an account with Jing online. This is as simple as providing your email address, username and a password. After this, I'd really recommend spending a couple of minutes at the Getting Started page. Usually I'm a 'trial and error' sort of person, but this time I took about 6 minutes to watch a couple of videos and actually knew what to do for a change! The whole process only took about 15 minutes!

Using Jing to Enhance Teaching
When I mentioned Jing to my tweeps (Twitter friends) some wrote back very excited about how they use Jing for teaching. @blenna uses it to create lesson plans. @crtwojtera uses it to capture wordles for her class blog. I used it to create a tutorial for students to use with our My Classes page. It's simple and easy to use and you have a number of options for how you save and/or share the file.

I plan to use Jing to create explanations for computer activities so that students can access them from home and continue their learning or explain it to their parents. I'm big on bridging the gap between home and school and providing students access to resources outside of school hours.

At the moment I'm still playing with Jing and getting used to recording myself as I do things on the computer. Check out my welcome post if you want to see a recent example.

How are you using Jing to address the challenges you face? How can you see it being implemented in the classroom? Please leave your ideas in the comments.