Jing
If you’re looking to do a quick screencast recording for times when it’s easier to show your students what you mean, perhaps the easiest to use and probably the fastest solution is Jing by TechSmith. Jing is a free utility that essentially lives on your desktop that will allow you to click an icon on your screen, select an area of your screen you want to record. Then, simply click the record button and start to talking to your computer. Once you’re done recording, you can click stop (or pause) and Jing will automatically begin an upload to TechSmith’s cloud server, Screencast.
While there are many uses for Jing, there are some things to consider that can outweigh the convenience and the minimal learning curve.
Jing recordings have a limit of 5 minutes so if you tend to explain things in depth, you may be cut off before you finish. Jing will automatically upload to Screencast once your recording is done and a link that you can distribute will be copied to your the clipboard. While TechSmith offers a free 2GB Screencast account which can tend to fill up, in general, it’s best to download your videos from Screencast to your Google Drive if you want to save them. Screencast. will allow you purchase an account however it is not recommended due to privacy concerns and there are better alternative options. Perhaps the biggest obstacle with using Jing to create videos that you would like reuse and distribute is that Jing saves as an .swf file and these will only play on a computer that has a Flash Player installed. While you can embed .swf files in your Moodle course, your videos will not play on most tablets or mobile devices. So if your goal is to distribute your video link to your students who may try to play them on their phone or mobile device then, Jing might not be the best option. If this is the case, you might consider one of TechSmith’s more robust screen capture tools such as Snagit.
For more information on how to use Jing, visit: TechSmith’s Jing Tutorials
Snagit
Screen capture videos are a great way to walk your students through a demonstration or to provide recorded video feedback quickly. If you are exploring screen capture tools, the next step up from Jing, also by TechSmith, is Snagit. Like Jing, Snagit is a utility that ‘lives’ on your desktop as a popup tool which makes it convenient to record your screen. In addition to creating a video or an image of your desktop, Snagit allows for full web page capture, it has unlimited recording time, it will save your files as universal file formats such as jpegs and mp4s for mobile devices and tablets, Snagit provides multiple cloud server options such as Google Drive and Youtube so you can save your videos directly to a folder on your Google Drive or distribute a Youtube link to your students. And, Snagit has basic markup and editing tools so you can refine your point even after you’ve recorded your video.
Tech Support
Unlike Panopto, Snagit and Jing are not an ETS supported enterprise tools which means you will need to rely on TechSmith for support however, some faculty still use them because of the convenience and swift path for distributing video content. While Jing is free, you can download a free Snagit trial that will allow you to test the software for 15 days. If it’s something you would like to add to your teaching tools, you can purchase an educator’s license for $29.95.
For more information on how to use Snagit, please visit: TechSmith Snagit Tutorials.
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