Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Saturday, October 3, 2009

Creating Instructional Videos and getting Screen Captures with Jing

This post discusses one way of getting screen captures from your desktop and creating short instructional videos of actions on a computer.

Maria Andersen from Teaching College Math put me on to Jing.

WHY IT'S WORTH DOWNLOADING
  • If you are involved with teaching others how to use software, Jing provides an efficient means of capturing images of programs from the desktop. You may already know about the Print Screen button on your keyboard, but Jing makes it easy to select only a particular region of the desktop.
  • Jing can be used to make videos of activity on the desktop.
  • For the basic features, it's free. And the basic features allow you to do many useful things. The Pro version looks fairly cheap.
  • It's user friendly.

MY SETUP
  • I set up the shortcut key Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C to trigger capture.
  • I set up the button settings for Save to automatically save to a specified location. This allows me to take a number of screen shots and then edit the file names later.

USE CASES
Embedding screenshots in a blog post
  • INTRODUCTION:At least in my blogging editor (Blogger), you need to save the picture files and then upload them. You can't just copy and paste a picture. 
  • DOING IT: Thus, to add screen captures to Blogger: 1) run capture in Jing; 2) Click save; 3) edit file name; 4) in Blogger, go to the post editor and click 'insert image'; 5) upload the image; 6) double click on the image in the Insert Picture Dialogue box to insert into the blog.
Here's an example using Jing to obtain a screen capture of Jing doing a screen capture of the Jing Icon in the system tray (leftmost icon).

Embedding a video in a blog post

And here's my proof of concept:


LEARNING MORE