Yesterday, Monday, October 1st, we held our first Brown Bag Monday Technology Lunchtime training. We were treated to a wonderful presentation on how to use Microsoft Journal given by our Chemistry teacher, Roderick Mobley, who has been using a Tablet PC for the past four years. Due to other commitments, some of our teachers who were interested were unable to attend this session.

Enter Jing, software from the Jing Project created by TechSmith software. Downloading and installing the appropriate software for either a PC or a Macintosh, a user now has the capabilities to capture either a screen image or create a video of what they are doing on the screen. Using a microphone, this now enables a user, either teacher or student to create a small tutorial. Once you are done, you have the capability of either saving the file to your computer or uploading them to TechSmith’s Screencast.com site. Screencast.com is currently a free site for the first 200 MB of storage space. Once uploaded, you can then share your movie via your blog or wiki.

At this point in time, it is an experimental project and there is no cost for using the software or for the storage. At some point in time, this may change. But a way to get around this is to make sure that you save all of the files that you create locally, so you can upload them to another host at a later point in time. When creating a movie, it creates a flash video file, which keeps file sizes reasonable. You are also limited to a 5 minute file, which should be fine for many tutorials.

To show you what can be done, I am posting two videos which I created which highlighted two concepts Roderick shared with us.

Adding an image and annotating it in Microsoft Journal
10_01_2007 10_23 PM

Importing a Word doc and annotating it in Microsoft Journal
10_01_2007 10_28 PM

Several of my colleagues have given positive reviews and this software bears further experimentation.