Web Tools Come In Handy For Your Holiday Party

A friend came to me the other day with a pressing issue: “I need you to teach me how to tie a bowtie.”

I showed him in person, the best I could without a mirror, but then I had to run to class, realizing that I hadn’t quite given the clearest instructions. So I half joking said, “You know, I could probably make a Jing that would walk you through it.” And yes, we all recognize the inherent dorkiness of making a screencast with step-by-step instructions on how to tie a bowtie. I’m okay with that.

Click for Jing tutorial

It turns out that most YouTube videos are not mirror images, which makes them difficult to follow along at home. But since I used the webcam on my laptop instead of a video camera, it’s backwards (and appropriately so; it’s what you want). So if you need to tie a bowtie — and yes, you should learn how to tie one — hopefully this will be helpful.

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Web Tools to Try – Jing

Okay, this is where the experimentation starts, right?

There are a few web tools that I’ve used in class over the past year or two, some with better results than others. So I want to share what I’ve found because you might find it helpful. I was going to explain a few and then talk about some others that I’ve heard of and I’d like to experiment with, but I’ll just let those topics come up in future posts. Let’s start with Jing:

Jing. Love it. Jing with PowerPoint or Pencil Animation? Even better.  This is a Jing Screencast that I made for my Biology class to explain how to embed a Jing tutorial into a blog. Here is the original blog post (Diffusion and Osmosis Assignment) that explains the goals of the project and a bit on how to do it. I was very excited about another Jing tutorial that I recorded (a day later I think) to show how to resize embedded video because I inadvertently managed to capture a Jing-Inside-A-Jing (previously thought to be impossible)! You might note at the very end that I tell the class they can start talking again. I made this tutorial during class in response to that question about how to resize embedded video. They watched me do it on the display screen/Smartboard, and I got to use that Jing to show my next section of Biology an hour later. [Apparently it’s easier to embed video on Blogger than WordPress, or maybe WP doesn’t like Jing’s code, so I’ve included hyperlinks above instead of embedded Jing videos — not ideal for a post on embedded videos, I know. Can anyone help me with this?]

Shelly Blake-Plock of the TeachPaperless Blog posts a great example of how he uses Jing to Comment on Student Work Online. This works great for giving feedback to students on a number of different applications: papers, PowerPoints, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s also useful because you can email the link of the JingCrit (Shelly’s term?) directly back to the student, especially when it wouldn’t be appropriate to post that feedback publicly (like putting their grade in the Comments section of their blog post).

Other uses: students record PowerPoints for practice (at home) before actual oral presentation to the class; for teachers to keep record of those oral presentations; to explain any number of concepts to peers (make a tutorial to show: long division, osmosis, sentence diagramming, study guide for foreign language with pictures, etc.); easy way to narrate a slide show; the Jing as the project itself (in lieu of oral pres to class), to be emailed to the teacher or posted on a blog; etc. etc.

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