The Jing Project

 

One of the main difficulties in web-based communication is that each person is looking at their own screen. Often, it is just so much easier to share you’re screen with someone else. Whether picture or video, Jing “adds visuals to your online conversations!”

Jing (website here) is a free download that lets you easily capture pictures or video and share them instantly with other people. Start by downloading the free program from their website (runs on both Macs and PC’s!). Use the easy menus to capture still pictures or videos right off your screen. Jing provides you with a simple link: just copy and paste to share your multimedia with students, friends, or family! Upgrade to Jing pro (for a fee) to share high quality video on youtube and other video sharing sites.

Features:

• Screen capture
• Screencasting
• Hosts all the multimedia for easy sharing
• Instant sharing with others
• FREE

Jing has a TON of uses. Easily show students, parents, or family members how to complete tasks. Create slideshows from pictures, or use it to collaborate on multimedia projects. Easily posts to twitter or facebook! Best of all, its easy to use!

We’ve started to incorporate Jing into our help-calls. Using Jing, we can quickly create a video walking users through a specific problem. Instead of sending the whole video, we only have to share the link through Screencast.com. How are you using Jing?

Dimdim (no we’re not talking about food)

 

 

 

In the expanding global environment it is becoming increasingly important to make sure everyone is connected. Web-conferencing has become a vital tool for companies and other groups as a means to collaborate with one another without being physically together.

Dimdim is an excellent free web-conferencing utility that allows for up to 20 participants in each session. The host signs up for an account via their website and then can send e-mail invitations to other attendees. One of the greatest features is that the participants in the conference do not have to sign up for an individual account to access the meeting. All they have to do is click on the link they received in their e-mail and enter a name to be used in the session.

Some of the key features of Dimdim include:

• up to 20 participants
• Host has video sharing via webcam, while all others share VoIP connections
• Host can share their computer screen, upload a PDF or PPT file, access a website or create a whiteboard for collaboration
• Leadership can be passed to any of the attendees allowing them to share things with the group
• Ability to record meetings allows you to go back and highlight key moments from the session
• compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems to ensure that everyone can participate

So this utility is obviously useful for multi-location business but nobody else right? WRONG! Any creative person could find an effective use for Dimdim. The application particularly lends itself to the educational environment. For example, professors could host web meetings to supplement lectures and develop review sessions.

If this is something you are interested in, follow the link to the Dimdim User Guide

These Bookmarks Are Delicious

There is a plethora of supplemental information available on the web. It can be tricky gathering all the relevant sources and sharing them with your students or colleagues. Every time a new website is found, you must send out the link or manually add it to your list. With social-bookmarking through Delicious, you no longer have to deal with the tedious process involved. 

Delicious, and other social-bookmarking sites, allows you to establish an account to share your bookmarks with others. Once you account is established you can simply add it to your Delicious list and “tag” it into a category. Tagging your bookmarks groups the sources into specific areas that are more easily shared with others. 

Let’s see how this could work for your class. Say you have a list of 20 or so websites that offer additional  information that could benefit students. In the old days you had to either print out and distribute your list of links or add them to your HuskyCT site one by one. Now, with Delicious, you can simply set up your list via your account and tag them into a category (your course name for example). Now your students, and whoever else you want to share with, can view the dynamic list of external sources by viewing a single web address (your personal Delicious page link). 

Podcasting Confusion

Podcasting has been creating a lot of buzz recently. Podcasts are a great tool for allowing anyone with the right setup to develop their own personal audio or video broadcast which can be downloaded to a portable media player. Many professors have been playing around with the idea of podcasting, especially for distributing lectures and reviews.

Although podcasting does open the door to a new and exciting opportunity for educational technology uses, there have been a few misconceptions to the notion that we are trying to clear up.

Some major points:

• True podcasting requires a server to host your audio files and an XML file for the RSS feed that would allow subscribers to automatically update their local copy of your collection of “broadcasts.”
• A quick and easy, effective alternative for instructional use of audio content is posting MP3 files directly to HuskyCT.

Check out this great video offering a simple, straightforward look at podcasting

Listen Up!

Audio content is an effective but underused teaching and learning resource. Using Audacity, an open source sound editor, instructors can quickly and easily create audio content for use in HuskyCT, PowerPoint, and even Podcasting. Creating audio files provides a valuable resource for students looking for extra reference or more in-depth explanation. Providing content in forms other than text is often more efficient and effective, but it also has benefits for students who may learn better from what they hear than what they read.

The following slideshow was presented at a recent IRC workshop given by Janet Jordan and Steve McDermott on February 25th, 2009 highlighting creation and usage of audio files in an educational setting.