Jing

What is Jing?

Jing is a free computer application by which you can capture screen shots or motions and record voice simultaneously. After downloading it, an icon appears at the top of your computer screen, and texts/arrows/highlights can be added to your captured images.  

http://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-jing-taking-your-first-capture.html

 

The first operational steps are; 1) Download software, 2) Create account, 3) Sign up for newsletter, 4) After installation, click on the first one to start screen capturing, 5) Drag the scale to mark an area you want to include and choose the function such as Image, Video etc. 6) Add texts and save and share the recordings on the social networking sites or send the image by email. For smooth understanding, it provides free training of tutorials, tech support, and lost software key on their homepage.

 

Why and how is Jing used in language learning?

You can use this powerful multipurpose tool for students’ vocabulary reinforcement, speaking, presentation on a picture/person, homework, or any interactive task-based activities before/during/after the class. It is not a one way transmission but an interactive communication tool. If you share the data with students or in social networking sites, you might receive some response and can re-construct the data mutually.  In particular, Jing is our ICT teacher - Russell’s favourate tool due to a great deal of functionality and potential capacity.  He originated an idea using Jing for giving video feedback, by which students can experience quick ‘live video’ corrections with a number of the data.

How can Jing foster language teaching?

Russell shows a variety of ideas for using Jing in his teachers’ training video.

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/jingInReality/index.html


This is my idea of using Jing:

 http://screencast.com/t/uSTJ43BD

l  I create a sunrise picture with voiced questions, and show the screen to the class, and let students make pairs and talk about the day’s topics, which are; how important is sunlight to you?  Do you enjoy sunbathing?  Why/Why not? 

After discussing with each pair, I type each summarized comment on a Jin’s space and share them with the class.

This activity will let students focus on the speaking in an enjoyable and innovative way. The combinations of visual/oral/aural effects stimulate students interesting more than a simple text and a pair or group work often solves a problem or creates better solutions through those process and reflection. Comments to the original question may produce another question. In addition, students can review and reply to peers’ comments as writing homework.

 

l  I create a tutorial presentation, which will help student enhance learning outcomes with multi-effects of visual/oral/aural effects. It is beneficial because I can concisely organize day’s target points beforehand and rewind and replay the presentation. It is also useful for students because they can view it at home for a review or as homework. Due to its effective time saving, I will be able to focus on face-to-face discussions during the class.

Advantages:

-       Engaging approach. Combination of visual and oral effects deepen processing

-       Emotion is uttered in human voice.

-       Multi-modality.

-       More impact than a single effect

-       Clarity.

-       Elaboration. Visual and oral effects can give much information.

-       Timeless distribution.

-       Stylistic

-       Teachers’ engagement

-       More interesting than a text

-       You can have a free space of Jing in your own computer

 

Limitations:

-       Teachers need basic or reasonable computer skills in order to use all devices such as an arrow etc.

-       Jing does not have a logout option. It is hard to discover an exit button from Jing. In fact, I noticed many people are still searching the function.  After seeking it for an hour, I could discover how to exit from Jing.  Firstly, click the ‘question mark’ icon on the right, and secondary, click the ‘power’ to exist from Jing. However, once you have exited from Jing, you will have to start it from the first step. 

-       Jing’s voice recordings are limited to 5 min. in length. However, if you create other separate ones and put them together with the original one, you may make a longer presentation.

-       Storage is limited to 2G a month since they are hosted on screencast.com. You can increase space to 25G with a Screencast Pro account.

-         I find that there are many advertisements.  Although Jing is a free tool, the company offers many paid options for adding advanced features on the same site. The differences between the paid and free versions are the ability to save files and better quality motion capture for screen casting from video sources or a Webcam.