Jane Hart's 10 Tool Challenge. Tool 2: Jing

Thanks to +Jane Hart and her 10 New Tools Challenge I am exploring Jing this month. Jing is a free, easy to use tool that allows you to do two key things:

You can create screencasts of up to five minutes in length 

You can annotate Power Point slides and manipulate the slides in interesting ways.

I created my free Jing account and immediately created my first screen cast. Besides the fact that I choose a size that was way too large to utilize in ways that I wanted, it was pretty near perfect on my first attempt. In sizing it down I encountered a further challenge in that I was unable to show the entire are of the website I wanted to show in the screencast. In order to see enough of the website I was featuring, the size is still a bit too big (as you can see below) for this blog post. I found that I could not shift the viewing area during the filming so sizing in this application could be an issue.

A bigger limitation of Jing is that the screencast must be no more than 5 minutes in length. Of more concern to me is that you cannot post directly to You Tube without upgrading to Snagit. Today I learned about a tool called Screencast-o-matic. Screencast-o-matic allows you to create screencasts up to 15 minutes in length and does allow you to upload to You Tube. It is exciting to see the free tools that are available to help you extend or enhance learning.