The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

Cross-posted from: Academic Technology @ Keene State College. Thanks to Judy Brophy for this great article.

Let's imagine that you're correcting a student paper and you note an error. You wish your student was right there so you could just talk briefly to her... but you can't, so you pick up your pen and start to write in the margin. You note her mistake and ask a few probing questions to try and help her for her next version of her draft.

STOP! You can provide meaningful auditory feedback to your student by using Jing desktop video tool. You can record your comments (you will need an external microphone or your computer must have a built in microphone) and upload the video with one click. Your student will get her paper with a url embedded as a comment near the the area that needs attention. Now she can hear your feedback in the context of the problem.

Jim Glading, adjunct professor at Southern NH University and Daniel Webster College used a Jing video to give feedback to a student who needed help with a citation for a paper.

Read the rest of the article and watch the video interview with Jim Glading here.

If you're reading this, you probably have a really good handle on how to use Jing.

But can you think back to when you first installed it? Did you even see the Sun launcher? What in the world is that yellow orb thing? Did you capture an image or video and wonder what's next?

We created an interactive, Flash-based tutorial. We'll get this into Jing for the next release, but we wanted people to try it right away. Do you think this would be helpful to new users? We're hoping to get some feedback and we encourage you to send it to others.

Why did we make this tutorial?

We know a few things. We know a lot of people can be confused by the non-traditional UI, and don't "get" the idea of sharing content via a Screencast.com link.

We also know that once people have that first successful share, they tend to get Jing and from then on, it's pretty easy.

This tutorial then, is just one more way to try and help people get off to a good start with a successful capture! We hope it works!

For this next release, we will be addressing some of our top feature requests from you. Among the improvements on tap is Facebook integration.

We've asked for feedback before, but this time, let's do something different.

We want to invite you to be a part of the Jing team. Well, as much as possible.

Most of you reading this are regular Jing users. Our guess is a lot of you also use Facebook.

Seems almost too logical then... If Jing is going to work with Facebook, and we have people who use Jing and Facebook, it seems we should work together to learn what people really want and nail this feature.

We revamped Jing's Facebook page, started a discussion and we hope people will talk with each other, and not just at us. To facilitate, we're going to be posting a lot of behind-the-scenes videos, demos of our progress and post specific questions which we hope will spawn some good discussion and debate. We hope some of you will take us up on it.

Hello world! My name is Alan and I'm the user experience\user interface designer on the Jing team (with a smattering of programming on the side). This is my first post on the blog!! Weee!

As you probably already know, we recently added Twitter to the list of places Jing can share captures to. I hope you all have been enjoying this new functionality, I know I certainly had a lot of fun working on it!

But now that it's been out in the wild a little bit, we'd really love if you could give us some feedback on this new feature. If you could spare a moment, completing this teeny-tiny survey that Anton put together would really help us gauge how well a certain aspect of the design is working. Also, if you have any other feedback or requests, please feel free to post a comment, or send it in through our feedback form!

Thanks, and happy Jinging!

Didn't get the Twitter button working? Check out the Twitter help topic for info on how to get it going.

Over the weekend, one of our users sent us the following question:

I'd like see how many views my links are receiving. Is that possible?

Yes, it is! Here is how:

1. Go to Screencast.com & sign in using your account info.
2. In your library, locate the Jing folder. This is where all your Jing captures are stored.



Tip: Did you know that you can send Jings to other folders in your Library?

3. Select Details View in the upper right corner.



4. The number of views for each item will now be shown in the right side column.



Tip: You can sort your captures using various criteria, including from most viewed to least viewed.

Check it out and see what your most popular Jing is!
I hope this post was helpful. Until next time!

Hi!

I just wanted to post a quick note to say thanks for using Jing and choosing to spend some of your valuable time checking out this blog from time to time. We try to mix it up with some educational stuff, some news, a little behind-the-scenes, and at times, pure silliness.

The Jing team is confident that you'll be seeing some really good stuff in 2010. We hope you'll stay with us for the ride. We wish you a happy holiday season, and hope it is even more spectacular than these amazing sweaters as modeled by various TechSmithies. Cheers!

I thought this post on Inside Higher Ed was quite interesting. Joshua Incorporates a neat idea about using #hashtags with Twitter and Jing. While it has an EDU perspective, I think it could apply just about anywhere.

Here's a snippet from one idea. Read the rest on the Inside Higher Ed blog.

"Give your class its own #hashtag. ... Then require your students to tweet anything relevant to the curriculum of the course. Part of this relevant tweeting could be doing voice-over screencasts using Jing where the students talk through why the link, site, application, article (whatever) is worth the classes attention."

Speaking of Education, did you know TechSmith has an education-focused site?

As you know, Jing is about quick and simple visual communication. Sure, our arrows aren't the fanciest and some people want to have control over the shadows (or no shadows at all!) We also get lots of requests wishing Jing could have some ability to capture more than what's on the screen.

When it comes to tons of features and options, Windows users have been able to turn to Snagit. Well, today TechSmith released a beta version of Snagit for Mac! Anyone can get access to it for free.

Betsy Weber, over on the Visual Lounge has all the details and a great overview video!

Check it out and tell us what you think!