Monday, July 9, 2012

TCU eLearning: Screencasting


Screencasting


Do you ever take still screenshots or record videos of your computer screen? This can be helpful for providing visuals to accompany directions related to any number of activities: a new computer program students have to use, resources they need to access online, or a complicated file upload procedure they need to follow.

For basic screencasting, we like Jing. Jing is also free, so that's a huge plus. Additionally, there are some very informative tutorials on the Jing website. Jing makes sharing pretty easy, so embedding or linking the files within your course shell is possible.

Before you start recording with Jing, you'll select the area of your screen you'd like to record (you can either record your entire screen or a just a portion thereof). Depending on what you do with this recording afterwards, you may end up changing the final display size of your recording. This is a handy tip about creating and maintaining optimum recording sizes - this seems especially helpful if you're switching between several programs or windows during your recording.

For most purposes, Jing will be fine. However, if you're looking to record a screencast longer than five minutes or do some advanced editing, you may be interested in (or already using) Snagit. Snagit, alas, is not free. However, I recently ran across information about Greenshot, a free alternative to Snagit. Jing and Snagit are nicely integrated with screencast.com, which makes sharing easy; I'm not exactly sure how easy it is to share your Greenshot recording or how many sharing options are available. If you're needing to record an occasional longer screencast and thus can't justify buying software to do it, Greenshot might be a good alternative for you.

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