Monday, 29 April 2013

How to star in your own production - podcasts, vodcasts, screencasts and other New Age tools

Task 5 - Select, try and review an online learning tool

After watching several screencasts while completing the previous tasks I became interested in exploring how they were created, so the screencast became my tool of choice for this task. I had a quick look at CamStudio before deciding to download and trial Jing from Techsmith instead. Techsmith has a much more professional website with a number of tutorials that clearly demonstrate how to use their products.

One thing not mentioned in the Jing tutorials is the need to download Microsoft.net if it is not already installed on your computer along with Jing (and presumably the other Techsmith products too). From what I can determine Microsoft.net is a software development framework which includes a library of objects required by some software to execute, but don't quote me on that! Suffice to say it is quite safe to download (thanks to my computer science undergraduate son for that assurance!).

Jing itself is very easy to use. It presents on the desktop as a sun in the centre top edge of the screen, but can be moved to other positions along the periphery. Placing the mouse on the sun causes three mini suns to extend, the first labelled Capture, the second History and the third More. Selecting Capture turns the mouse into a crosshair which enables you to frame the material you wish to capture in the screencast, in a similar way to the crop tool during picture editing. A menu appears underneath your selection enabling you to begin your capture as either a still shot or a video, the latter with original sound and/or voiceover if you wish.You can pause your video capture or mute it at any time during the maximum five minutes recording time allowed. On completion of your capture you may share it via Screencast.com or save it to your PC. If you choose to save it, it is possible to upload it at a later time by logging in to your Screencast.com account (required when setting up Jing).

If your capture is a still image a toolbar popup on the lefthand side of the frame provides editing options including highlighting, text boxes and arrows, with a variety of fonts, sizes and colours available. Jing saves images as .PNG files and videos as .SWF files. The pro version of Jing saves videos in the more user-friendly MP4 format but that has now been discontinued in favour of Snagit, another screencast tool available for purchase or free for a short trial period.

I experimented with Jing to create photo screencasts, annotated notes, edited movie videos and a short Excel tutorial, all very easily. I think Jing is a brilliant little tool for short instructional videos, even if it's just giving someone directions to a particular location. Apparently lots of other people agree as Jing continually pops up on internet searches as one of the most popular free screencasting tools available.

Below are the links to a few of my screencasts:

http://screencast.com/t/MN3jgpHAsZOm
http://www.screencast.com/users/yvonne15/folders/Default/media/6567d63f-50fb-4041-aa37-c736e9984b50
http://screencast.com/t/Zlyea6FMeaG 
http://screencast.com/t/dzoo8h7x

I enjoyed trialling Jing. It creates a basic screencast quickly and easily, and I do like the quirky sun icon concept!

1 comment:

  1. You know your projects stand out of the herd. There is something special about them. It seems to me all of them are really brilliant!
    crosshair generator

    ReplyDelete