IT 5130: Week 6 Tools

Jing
www.jingproject.com

Jing is a free service that lets you capture and share images and video from your computer and store them in multiple locations. Jing offers a free Screencast.com account with 2 GB of storage and transfer bandwidth each month, which seems to be a nice perk. Jing can also record your microphone input and at times, your system audio.

Jing does have some format limitations, though. All images are in PNG format and videos are always in SWF format. You also can’t resize your video recording at this time.

Overall, pretty interesting tool. Could be helpful in a classroom setting to let students that might be having a problem with a tool capture a screen with error messages.


Diigo
www.diigo.com

I’ve never really understood Diigo, even though I had to get a Diigo account for IT 5650. I can see its value as a book-marking site. But, due to computer security, I don’t want to download their toolbar to be able to use some of the more interesting features. Downloading application toolbars seems to conflict with the firewalls on my computer and render my computer nearly useless. However, I am intrigued by the ability to highlight information on a website.


Poll Everywhere
www.polleverywhere.com

Interesting concept. I especially liked how the site touted its ability to be used in fundraising. ;-) The pricing scale may be a bit unrealistic for large scale academic use. And in my case, we can’t use this commercial application from a closed network.


Screecast-o-matic
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

Very similar to Jing in function, but the site is not very user friendly. The program is a beta version and it doesn’t specify where the images will be stored. It does have the capability to embed the program into your own website so that other people can create screencasts. They can upload those screencasts to a channel that you create, but the website doesn’t really explain that capability well. Since it’s a beta version, the follow-on version of the website might provide more information.