Wow. My goal was to find and use 1 new web tool each week, but I’ve already met my goal for the month just today! Here are 2 of my finds!
This screencapture tool rocks my world, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it made my day. I’m writing an online Intro to Technology (VERY basic and for complete beginners) course and was really struggling to explain a lot of things without visuals. Well, during a conversation with Eric Brunsell yesterday, he just mentioned the word jing and I threw it in my mental junk drawer. Today as I’m searching for a good free screencapture app, it pops up and I trot off to find it. Here’s what I did with it in the first 5 min of downloading it:
Now, these are just my first efforts, but the ease of use and great potential for online tutorials and explanations make Jing a tool that I’ll be using in moodle and my blogs on a daily basis. If you’re in love with another screencapture app, please share so I can compare!
I started researching other blogging platforms in the name of knowing what I teach and stumbled upon tumblr (heard about it on twitter awhile ago, but never explored and forgot about it). This one I’m still VERY new to and I’m sure I haven’t quite gotten it yet, but it’s a really simple blogging (but without commenting feature) platform that allows you to add different types of media extremely easily. You can blog quotes, pictures, text, video, and chats as well as feeds from your other sites. Mine is still so new that it hasn’t updated the feeds yet, but from what I understand it will automatically post links to new posts on this blog and my del.icio.us links. One of the things that I really love is the quote feature, since I’m big on just throwing out sayings. Here’s what my test quote looks like on tumblr:
I’ll keep exploring tumblr - I think what I’ll be using it for is my non-edtech blogging needs………..like my strange desire to ALWAYS share when I’ve found a cool new book or product - right now my friends and family are subject to mass emails saying “you MUST read this, or you “MUST” buy this :-) (If for some reason you’re interested, you can check out Kate Says)
If you're new here (or just forgot last time!), you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I think Google’s Picasa will let you edit and resize your screenshots to fit better in your blog. I haven’t used it much since I made the mistake of purchasing photo editing software.
It looks really cool!
Hi Kate
I like the jing and I guess that is for pc’s and not just for macs. So, I will try that as soon as I get home from hols. To resize images, we use irfanview a lot and I have a tutorial on using it if you need. Let me know. It is a free download and rather good.
Eric and Anne -
Thanks much for the advice! I guess i just need to explore jing some more, right now I’m just using the embed code given immediately after the capture and haven’t really gotten into getting the images anywhere else to resize them. I’ve used photo editing software quite a bit, and maybe just need to actually go to screencast to do something with the image since that’s where it’s hosted through jing. Time is ALWAYS a factor!
Kate
I’ll try Jing, Kate and let you know what I think of it. Sarah
You can re-size photos in Edublogs’ post editor, or just thumbnail them and have them link to the bigger photos.
This is my favorite Edublogs theme, and it was my blog’s theme for months until I ran into the same problem - center column’s just too narrow to do much with directly embedded pics.
Damian -
Thanks! Your comment led me to change my theme yet again :-)
All - I figured out, through help from @lornacost to go into my code (which i had tried, but didn’t do right) on the post and change the size of the screenshot directly from there. Being the geek that I am, I actually used excel to make sure I had the proportions exactly right so the images didn’t look distorted. Changing the theme did help, though, as the single sidebar gives more room for the post. Thanks again for all the help!
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Jing! My only problem is resizing the window when I want to embed it in my class webpage. Talked with the people at Jing and it’s a feature they are hoping to add in a future upgrade. I like it so much, I’m writing an article about it, and screencasting in general, to share in a library magazine. Alan November even sang its praises at FETC last week. :-)
Hi Kate!
I just thought I’d help you out in your quest for finding a web tool in the coming weeks, though it shouldn’t be hard since the internet is chock full of rich applications. The tool I have in mind is Mixbook.com. This allows you to create online photobooks with pictures and text collaboratively. They can be embedded on a blog and/or printed. Quite a few teachers have started to use it. Hope you like it!
-Travis
Michelle -
Keep me posted if you hear of any upgrades! I’m pretty much using it exclusively to embed the screenshots in my online courses (e-books) and on my blogs. While changing the code works, it’s definitely not the easiest thing.
Travis -
Thanks for the mixbook recommendation, I’ll be checking it out!
Kate
Leave a Comment