Free Resources from the Net for EVERY Learner

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

I seldom get as excited when testing a new resource as I did when I checked out Jing. For both usefulness and ease of use, it would be hard to beat! This one’s another crossover that blends an installed program with some Web 2.0 functionality. The one big caveat is that this resource may not remain free of charge after an initial period while it is “tested” by the public.

Jing This is a powerful program from TechSmith, the company behind Camtasia. Jing makes it easy to capture still screen images or to create video screencasts, and then share them. This is invaluable if you want to help anyone else learn to use software, or do anything else on a computer.

With Jing, it’s a cinch to make a screen capture or a video that includes audio commentary. Once that’s done, the image or video can be saved to your computer and/or stored online. Jing makes it convenient to share the online version. You simply paste the URL into an email or chat and then send it along. Unless you are going to be sharing the screencast offline, there is no reason to save to your computer. You can go back to Jing any time to retrieve screencasts that you’ve made in the past.

The quality of both the audio and video on a Jing flash file is excellent. I used Firefox to open and view a screencast that I emailed to myself, and I was thoroughly impressed. The files you store on your own computer are just as good. Click here to check that out for yourself. I made a 30 second screencast just to show you.

There are numerous potential uses for Jing. You can use it to prepare a series of tutorials for a course. Or, you can use it for remote assistance when you can’t be there to help in person. When giving a workshop, you might want to leave your participants with a set of screencasts that they can go back to afterwards. I haven’t tried this yet, but I can even envision ways of using Jing for digital story-telling.

Kudos to TechSmith for providing us with a great resouorce! Let’s hope they decide to offer it indefinitely as a free resource to educators.