Jing, useful or not?

Jing was introduced during an ICT presentation.  It is a screen capture tool that provides two functions which are capturing videos and capturing images.  The use of Jing, allows a user to make a digital video of the events that are taking place on your computer screen.  During the time that the actions are being captured, voice can be captured as well.  When capturing images on the screen, using Jing the user can use options such as arrows, text, highlighters, and boxes.  Once the movements are captured, the product (video or still images) are stored in the history submenu of Jing.  Once they are stored in this submenu, the user can either choose to save them or simply post them onto a website by using screencast.com.  The use of the screencast.com website, the ability to link images to a website are made possible.  

The use of Jing, in a teaching environment can be useful if used properly.  As introduced, and agreed upon by myself, Jing would be useful if it was used when creating How-To instructional videos.  For an instructor, these How-To videos could be useful when introducing all sorts of concepts to a student.  Students could thus better their knowledge through these videos.  

Although, I think that the use of Jing would be very useful in a student learning environment, like any other piece of technology, it has its limitations.  Firstly, the free version of Jing available only records video in shockwave flash video format, which may be very difficult to edit.  Due to the fact that different students have different strengths and weaknesses, the ability to be able to work around possible editing struggles may be difficult.  Secondly, video capturing with the use of Jing is only limited to five minutes, which may in turn cause a disadvantage for the user.  This is because if her or she needs to capture more that five minutes of video to point out their direction or lesson, this would be impossible.  Finally, Jing needs to continuously run in the background, simply meaning that it is always on.   This can also pose an issue when the educator is trying to use Jing.

If I were given the opportunity to teach a course, and in one specific aspect of it to introduce Jing, I would.  I would probably feel most comfortable doing this by creating a How-To video to teach my class.  I would simply accomplish this by recording a demo of what I wanted the students to attain knowledge in by using appropriate images and sounds to capture the learning outcome.  By creating this video, not only would I want to teach the class an easy way to access this information, and learn it but to also be able to take this video away to be learned or accessed at another time.  Whether this mean revisiting this video later for notes purposes, or for the purpose of studying for a test.  Also, if an outsider was to view this video, I would also wan him or her to be able to follow along and learn.  This would in turn, make the learning accessible to all.  

Jing can be accessed at : http://www.jingproject.com/

* Snap a picture of your screen

* Record video of onscreen action

* Share instantly over the wed, IM, email