As technology and teaching becomes more and more important, so does the need to teach others to use that technology. For a while the standard in the industry has been Camtasia. Don’t get me wrong, the program is great, but it costs around $300. Not always feasible for educators like me.

A couple days ago Doug Edmunds from the School of Law here on campus sent out a link to a new, free (for now) screen capture program called Jing. This article looks at how to use the program, some of the features, and some missing features.

How it Works:
Users need to download and install a small (4.4MB) application on your computer (works with both MAC’s and PC’s. The program then runs in your desktop and adds a little yellow transparent half-circle to your screen that is always visible. When you mouse over the half-circle it reveals a capture option. After you’re picture/video capture (see below) you can then save it locally or instantly upload it online and share it via a URL that is conveniently copied to your clipboard.

In their FAQ page the makers of Jing introduce it in the following way:

Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.

Features:

• Capture: The capture utility is smart cross-hair axis that intuitively selects certain parts of your screen.
• Picture Capture: Highlight any portion of the screen for the picture capture and then annotate it EASILY with arrows, text, highlighter, and boxes.
  • Save locally as PNG file
  • Share online using Screencast (Free up to 200MB)
  • Here is a picture I made of one of the FAQ’s.
  • The picture above was quickly made with a screen cast… even easier than picnik.
• Video Capture: Highlight any portion of the screen again and walk through anything.
  • Share online using Screencast.
  • Here is a short demo I made in about 15 seconds about how to subscribe to a blog via Google Reader.
  • Notice there is sound… I didn’t realize that till after I had made it).
• History Page: Find anything you have ever done and use the link again or delete it.

Missing Features/Cons:

• Embed Function: There really should be the option of embedding a video/picture in a page with code. A link is nice, but anyone who is building a tutorial really needs to be able to have everything in the same page.
• Upload to second sites: It would be nice to be able to upload the video’s to other sites for more exposure.
• Editing: As far as I can tell there is no way to edit marks after you have put them on pictures. That is annoying.
• Project?: They authors make it very clear on the FAQ page that this is just a project and will probably lead to a product (that costs money) someday. They do promise to give us time to get our stuff off of their servers though.

Summing Up
I have to say I was most impressed with the ease with which one could create a picture and instantly annote it and share it with friends. I am going to definetly leave this running for the next while and look for opportunities to use it to educate others.

How might you use this in your classroom, in your job?