Thing 18: Jing / screen capture / podcasts (making and following them)

I must admit I thought I would play around making screen casts to see what it was all about, and maybe even look at ways of incorporating them into my work so left this 'Thing' on the back burner.  I then attended a web 2.0 training course for librarians from WISE Kids and part of our homework was to take what we had learnt and apply it to our working life, and yet again I thought of screen casts.  Luckily for me my colleague Paul Richardson is holding a webinar this month and after some discussion he thought it would be useful for me to create some screen casts to support the session, so it all came together in the end.

I signed up for and used Jing to make my screen casts, I'm aware there are a lot out there but I decided on Jing under recommendation from JISC Digital Media and they know their stuff! It seemed like a quite simple process installing it and I like the sun icon at the top of my screen.  I began with a few practice runs to get used to Jing but it didn't take long as its quite intuitive.  I particuraly liked the 3, 2, 1 count down to the recording starting, it gave me a bit of time to get prepared and made me feel professional.  Any here's what I have created: How_to_search_for_RSS_feeds_in_Google_Reader

The only thing I don't like is that although I can save the files to my computer they're not in a format I can watch, that might need some exploring, so for the moment I view them via the Jing screen cast sharing website called screencast.com.

Personally I watch quite a few screen casts (or captures) to learn how to do things, I find it easier than working through a page of instructions.  This got me thinking about libraries and the amount of 'How to' sheets I see that could easily translate into screen casts.

I also follow quite a few podcasts, my work takes me on long journeys and I find podcasts a great way to catch up with whats happening in the world.

All in all I think screen captures/casts/whatevers and podcasts could make explaining library features more accessible and enjoyable.  I hope to create more and maybe incorporating a screen cast into a video blog at some point.