Jing-a-ling!

I am really excited to pass along two different sites this week, TeacherTube and Jing. Since one of my classes is working with digital video, I've been pretty immersed in that technology these past two weeks. The sites I'm sharing today are ones that I think no teacher should be without!

If I could share just one link with you today, it would be TeacherTube. Hey that sounds a lot like YouTube, you might say. Well it is, only it's for teacher's! TeacherTube provides videos on various topics, from electromagnetism to music. Just think, a place to find some professional development video without having to worry about polar bears or kittens playing with string. (Check out the Diet Coke and Mentos video if you get a chance. What kid wouldn't get excited about that kind of experiment after watching it? Too COOL!)

The other link is for a new project by the people at TechSmith called Jing. Here's waht their site has to say about the project, "The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere." And that is exactly what it does! This little program holds such vast potential for instruction, especially techology instruction. After all, who hasn't had to type directions for how to use a specific program's functionality? They get to be so long and we invariably miss something important. And although screen shots are nice, they take a lot of memory in our documents and emailing memory intensive items can be tricky for a lot of servers.
Enter Jing! Jing looks like a little sunshine sitting at the top of your desktop, at all times ready to capture what's on your screen at a moments notice. Who wouldn't love a way to video the steps in formatting or creating a chart in Excel? It sure beats typing the 25 instruction steps that it might take when sharing those same directions verbally. And what a boon for the visual learners among us! Finally, we can SEE how to set the homepage of our browser to a page other than the default.
Jing makes this possible by capturing the screen image or video and then saving them to screencast.com A screencast is a recording of the computer screen, sometimes narrated, that is usually used to instruct or demonstrate. A link is then posted to the clipboard on your computer and you can share that link with anyone via email, IM, in your blog, etc. Jing can even be embedded into blogs and other webpages for easier navigation. How cool is that?!
Check it out and see what you think. The people at the Jing project want your feedback so they can make Jing even more "Jing-a-licious."
Oh, and did I mention the very best thing? It's absolutely FREE and works on both PC and Mac platforms. Now go out there and get Jing-ing!