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  • Jing For Student Authoring

    By Joshua Kim June 13, 2010 6:47 pm EDT

    Have you thought about having your students create voice-over presentations to share with your class? Instead of (or in addition to) having your students give live class presentations, a voice-over PowerPoint can be easily recorded and shared through the LMS.

    The 5 best things about using Jing, PowerPoint and the Discussion Board:

    1. Free: Jing is free for your students. As long as they have PowerPoint, they (or your institution) will not need to pay for any new software. (If they don't have PowerPoint, they could always get the free OpenOffice or use Google Presentation). A free voice-over authoring tool is compelling, as one of the main inhibitors to having students create voice-over presentations has been the cost of the applications. Jing is also cross-platform.

    2. Easy: Check out this screencast I made for my students on how to record a voice-over presentation using Jing and PowerPoint. I also have a screencast on how to post the Jing file (which is a *.swf file) to the Discussion Board in Blackboard.

    3. Fun: Students really enjoy creating voice-over presentations that they can share with the professor and the rest of the class. You will find some students excel at this medium, displaying creativity and professional polish (and sometimes you'll be surprised that your best presenters struggle with other aspects of the class). Classes should provide a variety of ways for students to create and share, from text (papers), to discussion posts, blogs, oral presentations, and voice-over presentations.

    4. Learning: The system I use in my classes, and recommend to professors I work with, is to have the students "teach" whatever part of the reading for the week that they find most compelling. Part of the learning is that the students need to compete for the scarce attention of their classmates. The process of creating the voice-over presentations forces the students to actively engage with the material, make decisions about what to share and synthesize, and to make decisions about the best way to present the material.

    5. Brevity: One of the aspects I love about Jing is that the tool limits presentations to 5 minutes. It is a real challenge for the students to think about how to "teach" the material for the week, the curriculum they think is most important, within a 5 minute block. The time limit forces the students to get away from "coverage", and instead think about their audience and the narrative of their presentation. Listening to a number of 5 minute presentations, and providing feedback, is reasonable task for both instructors and students.

    I'd also argue that learning how to create engaging and compelling presentations for the Web, using Web 2.0 tools, is emerging as a core competence for anyone entering the job market.

    Have any of you experimented with having our students create and share voice-over presentations through your LMS? What tools have you used?

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Comments on Jing For Student Authoring

  • good communication tool
  • Posted by Andy Rundquist , physics on June 14, 2010 at 5:15am EDT

  • I use Jing quite a bit for my own teaching. I really like the 5 minute limitation for myself for a particular topic and I tend to post 4 or 5 for a particular lecture's material.

    I also use Jing to give students individual feedback on assignments. I find I can talk faster than I can write and so I'm able to give lots of feedback on various issues. This, of course, only works if you have your students work in digital form but I'll scan it if I only have a paper copy.

    This article describes the next step I'd like to take. I've had my research students use Jing to bring me up to speed on what they're doing and I'd really like to move on to having all my students consider Jing to be yet another avenue of communication they can use.

  • Jing records anything on your PC or Mac
  • Posted by Ed Garay at University of Illinois at Chicago on June 14, 2010 at 8:30am EDT

  • TechSmith's Jing is a fantastic tool and too easy to use, but we should mention to everyone that does not know that Jing is a screen recorder, that is, it can ge use to record and narrate anything we do on a Windows or Mac personal computer.

    Students, for instance, could narrate Web-based presentations and school work in blogs, wikis, Web sites and Web applications they have created, add voice to their Web tours or overview of programming assignments or to any assignment that lives on a computer.

    Our Blackboard system has Wimba Voice tools which also makes it very easy for instructors and students to simply speak into the microphone to add voice content to Blackboard course sites, discussion boards, voice announcements and text chats; we can even give students the option to upload MP3 audio content and submit Podcast assignments effortlessly. Jing complements this very nicely by providing a simple screen recorder for anything we can do on a personal computer. (great for short tutorials too)

    Greetings from Chicago.

  • SO easy
  • Posted by Fran , Asst. Prof. Art History/Hillyer College at University of Hartford on June 14, 2010 at 11:45am EDT

  • I've been using VoiceThread and while I liked the elements that it let me do--drawing lines, opening discussion--I felt it had a high learning curve for my students. Jing is just right! I read your column, watched your youtube posts, and then did my own within 45 min. I have a really good tool now for having them work with video and sound. Awesome.

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