I recently published an entry on our internal educational technology blog at work about the Jing Project, introducing it as an effective screencasting tool for educators and I wanted to mention it here as well. Jing is an experiment from TechSmith, a company best known for it’s screen capture software Camtasia. While Camtasia is a full-featured and powerful product designed for much of the same purpose as Jing, the latter exceeds in the area of user-friendliness.
The basis of what makes Jing such a great tool is it’s unique take on how to capture, save, and share. Where most screen capture programs expect the user to dedicate time to using their product, the Jing Project is designed to dedicate it’s time to when the user is ready to use it, whether on a whim or during a planned time frame.
The breakdown goes like this: Jing runs in a lightweight form on the users desktop and at any time is accessible by one or two clicks and it’s capturing still or video of desktop activity with narration options included.
I can’t express how easy it is to respond to an instructors question regarding the latest LMS upgrade with a short, spontaneous video walking them through the process. Using similar tools from Adobe, and even TechSmith, I would need to open an additional program, set the the options to my preference and dedicate time to recording and choosing how I want to output the final product. With Jing the options are fewer but I am freed from dedicating any time to the process.
The Jing Project doesn’t compete with Adobe’s Captivate or TechSmith’s Camtasia in the areas of power and output options but does the basic job with no fuss, even going a step further to provide free space (for the time being) on screencast.com where users can immediately upload their captures for broadcast rather then the typical option of saving and emailing the final product or hosting it yourself.
For the time being the Jing Project is free for download and use and I’d recommend checking it out while it remains available.
