Jing for Video Tutorials

Jing is a Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create and save screen shots and create video tutorials for online tasks.  I've seen step by step tutorials from a computer before, I had never thought of creating one myself.  It is definitely a great classroom tool to use when technology is an important component in your school and classroom.  With my student teaching experience, the school I'm working at is very gifted in the technology department.  All students at the elementary school have access to laptops, and in 4th grade, they all get Gmail accounts, and they use technology every day.

So for my Jing experiment, I made a video tutorial of how to create a Google Doc and share it.  My students would share documents almost everyday, so this would be a great way to introduce the "how-to" nature of the task using a tech medium.  Of course, I could verbalize these steps, but from what I've learned in telling students what to do on a computer, all students are never listening at the same time.  When they are watching a video, all eyes are on the screen and all attention is focused.  So I could show this video at the beginning of the year, and in around a minute, the students would understand what to do.  

So... the PURPOSE of JING:  Create and share screen shots and video web tutorials using a simplified and user friendly tool.  

IDEAL TARGET AUDIENCE:  All ages and grade levels!  Teachers could create Jing files/videos to share with any age student who has access to computers.  Students, with the help of teacher support for downloading, can use Jing to save images found on the web, and create video tutorials.  

USABILITY:  One glitch of Jing is that you have to download the application to your computer.  School computers might not allow this, so keep that in mind.  The application tool box that appears at the top or corner of your screen is easy to use and very clearly labeled.  It takes some tinkering to figure out where exactly the video goes and how to share it... but check out my next post to see how to embed a Jing video!