The Jing Project - screencasting made simple

While teaching Web Design to Key Stage 4 students, I’ve spent a lot of time this week with The Jing Project, TechSmith’s new (free, for now) screen capturing software for both Windows and Mac. From their website:

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

I’ve used other screen capturing software to record tutorials to share with students (Adobe Captivate, for instance) but nothing I’ve seen has anything like the ease of use of Jing. It’s so easy to use that I actually recorded tutorials as I demo-ed ideas to students. Here’s a quick run through recording a screencast with Jing:

Jing sits silently in the background, ready to record:

I click the “+” symbol, and either click on the window I want to record or drag a selection box around the screen area I want to record. I then click on the Video button to start recording my screencast. Jing checks my microphone, gives me a quick countdown, and starts recording:

When I’ve finished my demo, I click the stop button on the recording toolbar. I can then share my screencast in several ways:

The “Share” option uploads the screencast to some free hosting at screencast.com and provides me with the URL to paste into my blog. It also allows me to embed the video inside my blog by providing HTML code to paste into a blog entry. The whole process is very simple.

The “Save” option allows me to save the screencast to my computer as a single Flash (swf) file. I could then easily upload this to the intranet/internet to share the screencast with colleagues or students, or insert the swf file into a Smart Notebook presentation.

The Jing Project can also be used to create annotated screenshots. It provides some basic tools to label up screenshots before sharing them via the web or downloading them to the desktop. I haven’t really played with this yet (I’m addicted to the fantastic Skitch on Mac OS X for screenshots).

All in all, Jing is amazing. Here is a complete list of the Dreamweaver tutorials I recorded this week (they will open in a new window):

• Setting up a site in Dreamweaver
• Setting up template tables - part 1
• Setting up template tables - part 2
• Attaching a stylesheet and making some basic styles
• Editable regions and linking the pages together
• Styling the content area and links in the navbar
• Styling the navigation bar
• The a:hover attribute - styling link roll-overs
• Adding borders to page elements
• Typography - styling headings and paragraphs
• Resizing images for the web
• Using the float property to make text around images
• Adding a contact form using Emailmeform.com

I have only one note of caution. From the Jing website:

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else.

To me, that read as “At some point in the future, we’ll probably charge you for this”. Am I cynical? No, the FAQs for the Jing Project actually make this clear (http://www.jingproject.com/faq.asp). The free hosting at screencast.com will only last for the duration of the project, so hold onto copies of your screencasts as swf files to potentially deploy elsewhere when the time comes. How long it will be before “The Jing Project” turns into “The Jing Product” is not clear.

Make hay while the Sun shines, and give Jing a try.

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