Jing and Ning

It seems funny that out of all of the tools available on Web 2.0, I have been working for the past few days on the rhyming pair – Jing and Ning. I just wanted to share my experiences using them since I am a new user for both tools.

I decided to try out Jing to create a screencast for our collaborative class wiki project in EC&I 831. I had downloaded Jing a while ago, but hadn’t really found a suitable time to use it. I decided that I should try it out to show how to sign up to use Ning, which is a website where you can create your own social network based on a specific interest or focus. Since I had created my own Ning for my Major Digital Project, I thought it would be useful for my own development also.

I found that Jing was fairly easy to use. I read a few FAQ on the website and went through the “Getting Started Stuff“. I played around a few times just to get my microphone set properly and stop stuttering through it with the “uhs” and “ums” which were quite frequent! After the initial few hiccups, I got through the points I wanted and had used up the 5 minute limit for the screencast.

Some lessons learned though and the hard way. DO NOT embed this on a wiki. The screen size is huge and I ended up wiping out the menu on the page that lets you navigate and therefore edit the page – oops! I ended up doing a work around and renaming the page from social networks to social networking and adding the screencast as a link. The other issue I had was trying to figure out where my screencast was. Jing uses Screencast.com to host the items that people create. Once I figured that out, it is as easy as logging into Screencast.com and clicking on your project. Then at the bottom of that screen if you click on details, it displays the information for the URL, the embed code or to email it. In the end, it worked and I was inspired to add more information to the page and hope to add more when I can.

I hope to play more with screencasts and wanted to try out Camtasia Studios, however, that is not offered up free anymore, so it is back to the drawing board. Going to check out some of the ones listed on this site. If you have tried any out, I would be interested to hear your opinions on them.