#12 Jing

What is it? What does it do?

Jing is a brilliant screen-capture tool, with a lovely design and integrated features which enables recordings to be shared easily.  It can be used by teachers and students alike for demonstrations, presentations and, most interestingly, for providing feedback. 

Once Jing is downloaded from screen-capture specialists, TechSmith, a bright orange sun sits on your computer screen ready for you to capture anything you want.  Select the size of the window that you want to share and start recording.  Anything you do or show within the window is captured. You can talk over the recording (microphone input) or take sound that is playing from your computer (stereo mix).  
Or you can simply capture an image.

 This video was made using Camtasia Studio 7, another Techsmith product.

Jing is entirely free, although I do recommend purchasing the inexpensive 'Pro' version, which allows for Webcam recording, saving in MPEG-4 format and instant sharing on YouTube and 10 x times as much storage space (20GB) on the server.

Screen Capture of a screen capture

Once a video capture has been made it can be instantly viewed or shared via screencast.  Uploading is quick and sharing is easy because as soon as the video is processed an automatic link is copied and pasted to your computer's clipboard.  This can then be included in an email, placed in a document or anything you are sharing with a potential viewer.   You can also set the share option to send you back an 'embed
code' for inserting directly into a blog or other webpage.

Note: Jing also has its own blog, which details the history of the Jing Project, and has news, advice and more.

Relevance to language learning?

Jing has major relevance for being used both in and out of the classroom.  It is probably the most useful tool for ELT available right now, having many articles written about it and is the most popular video on Russell Stannard's TeacherTrainingVideos.com. 

Grammar feedback

One critical area which has so far not been discussed much, with the previous 11 tools, is that of feedback.  Screen capture software such as Jing enables a teacher to actually take students' work (for example, an essay they have written), do a commentary on it and visually point to any errors on screen.  The capture is not limited by size because the teacher can scroll up and down the work, highlighting, changing or whatever is needed to clarify where a student has gone right or wrong.  This is much more powerful feedback than simply scrawling comments, in different coloured ink, on a students' paper, hoping that they understand what it says.   It can provide better quality and in-depth feedback in a motivating way.  In addition, the teacher can control the amount of feedback given which would be different if a teacher had a face-to-face chat with each student about their work. Finally, a student can replay any link repeatedly in their own time until they understand, rather than pretending they have understood at the time of the feedback. Therefore, it potentially saves loss of face for both teacher and, especially, student.

It also has huge possibilities for students to build upon what they have been taught in class time.  By giving the tool to the students, they can practice new vocabulary, use it more effectively in context and produce work that is easily shareable or able to be assessed.

How can it be used?

The possibilities are almost endless for how Jing can be used in ELT.  The key point to remember, when asking the students to use it, is to build in a structure or framework for using it during class, such as pre-teching vocabulary, showing examples or practicing techniques.  Here are a few examples of how Jing can be used:

Teacher -> Student

•  Show websites for the students to go to.
•  Demonstrate how to search for and use something on the Internet.
•  Highlight the pronunciation of words in a vocabulary list.
• Demonstrate general grammar points or regular mistakes which a class are making.
• Give advice on writing structure, e.g. paragraphing and cohesion.
• Giving feedback (as stated above) on individual students' pieces of work.  
• Correct students' work or give guidance to the student for them to correct their own work.
• Show model answers and give explanations as to why they are.

Idea: Get students to do sport commentaries in pairs

Student -> Teacher

• Submit speaking homework/assignments, following a classroom activity.
• Talk about a picture or photograph they have taken, again following a classroom activity. They can use their mouse to point to different elements.
• Present a timeline of their life (for older students) or describing their family (younger students).
• Using a webcam, perform an interview or role-play (in pairs).
• Used as a reflection tool by students to record their thought progress when doing an activity or over an entire course. 
• Using a webcam to perform a 'show and tell' style speaking exercise - e.g. 'this is an award I won for being the best swimmer in my year at school'.
• Commentating on a sports clip. e.g. of their favourite football team scoring a goal, or on a tennis match, in which one plays the commentator and the other one is the summariser.  These terms are intresting, as in the classroom, you could try to elicit the difference between the two.
•  Voicover - a lot of fun can be generated from getting pairs or groups of students to do a voiceover in one style of a TV or movie clip which has an entirely different style.   I give the examples of the 'Dubbed Hitler' set of clips, taking sequences from the movie, 'Downfall', and producing a 'mashup' of different styles to comic effect.  Star Wars, Star Trek and other sci-fi greats are often targets for this kind of exercise. Students could be shown examples and then they could go and make their own, turning the volume down on the clip and creating their own soundtrack!  Can be varied depending on culture, level etc.

What limitations are there?

There are no limitations really for the numbers of ways that Jing can be used.  Giving individual feedback , as described above, can be quite time-consuming so, despite the benefits, teachers may be reluctant to spend time using it.

The tool, however, only allows, five minutes of recording time for each capture.  The free version also restricts saving the video in SWF (flash) video format only and 2GB worth of free space.  Check the Techsmith website for up-to-date news on this as might be changing soon.

#11 Bubblr

What is it? What does it do?

Bubblr by Pimpampum is a simple and effective photo-based tool which students could easily use to produce a comic-strip (slide-show) style presentation.  It uses the huge Yahoo owned image repository, Flickr, which boasts over 6 billion images.    
Not all the images are available, however, as it depends the Flickr user has opened up the photos with a non-commercial Creative Commons licence.  You can see exactly how many photos on Flickr have been offered the different types of CC licence usage here.  It's only a fraction of the 6 billion but still provides a wealth of material to use in Bubblr.  The image quality is consistently good as well.

To play with Bubblr I unearthed some photos from my trip to Tanzania and, in particular, a 5-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro.  At first these did not show up when I searched using the tag 'Kilimanjaro'. Plenty of other photos did.  As I wanted to do a comic-strip using my own photos, I had to change the licence terms from 'All Rights Reserved' first.  In addition, to find only my photos I had to add a unique tag, 'Ashantikili'.  Although if you upload a newly-tagged set then a Bubblr search jusing any tag will probably bring up yours first.  Or you can search by User - I'm known as Teacher Phili, unsurprisingly.

It is very easy to drag and drop a selection of images onto your comic-strip, although can take a little longer if you are arranging photos in some kind of chronological sequence, which I needed to as I was 'showing' a narrative over 5 days.   Then you can add one of 3 kinds of text bubble to each image, which can then form the basis of a presentation or these can do all the 'talking' themselves.  There are no limit to the number of bubbles that can be added but too many might devalue the image.  Frames can be inserted before or after slides, but it takes a while to get used to not deleting images already added, which then need to be located again. 

 
Pimpampum also created Bookr, which is very similar to Bubblr, but presents the photos in a stylish, turnable book format.

Bubblr is very easy for students to use. You don't need to sign in or create an account. Finding relevant photos is straightforward if the user is not too fussy or specific.  Even without an existing Yahoo/Flickr account, students can find a wealth of images to form the basis of a descriptive presentation, tell a story or narrative an event in their lives.  Adding bubbles is a fun and interesting way to express opinion or invent dialogue - if the images show people.  

• It could be used in the classroom for:

• storytelling - students find images which build up a narrative which then has text added like a proper comic-strip. 
• personal backgrounds - about where a student is from, their hometown/country, local cusine etc. Great for earlier lessons when students have to introduce themselves to the class.
• caption competition - an extension of the idea of adding 'funny texts or dialogue to images, often involving people or animals.  The speech or thought bubbles could be used here.
• Correcting errors - student can view the Bubblr archive (of previously made strips) and  'recycle' one which has errors or needs improving/changing. 
• Presenting - more elaborate ideas could involve running the strip through screen capture software to add a voiceover.
• A strip could also be easily constructed at home as an out of class activity.  Published strips can be emailed or embedded into a blog when complete.

• Personally, I can see a number of limitations with this tool.  For starters, the photos accessible are only those with one of the six differnet versions of Creative Commons licence - around 220 million.   Non-copyrighted/all rights reserved/watermarked images are obviously excluded.
• Navigation is a little clumsy.  The 'After current' frame button doesn't appear clearly in my browser.  You have to be careful not to delete or replace photos accidentally.  Scrolling along the strip usually works but images can overshoot, which is an issue if you want to do a screen capture with it.
• The search terms are limited.  Unless a student uses a specific term/set of photos or uploads their own, they may struggle to get exactly the images they want.  Only 17 images are shown at once and in the order they have been uploaded onto Flickr (most recent first).
• The bubbles are too basic, and not particularly editable. Text can only be in one style, no bold or font types, for example.  Images might vary in size depending on original source.
• There is no option to add audio.
• It doesn't seem possible to delete a strip once published, presumably because then you could delete strips created by others.
• There are not many options or fancy variations for the strip.
• On several occasions the Adobe Flash plug-in crashed when using and I was initially unable to access my finished strip from the archive.  When I tried to embed the remixed version in the blog, it also crashed...

With patience and some effort - the version shown is the remixed Bubblr version which I published and then recycled (improved) - I did manage to get a strip together, recorded it with Jing (see #12) and added some instrumental music*, before publishing it with Camtasia and posting on YouTube. This, however, defeats the point of using Bubblr in the first place.

*This video, PHILI DOES KILI includes content that is licenced and sold by RECISIO and was purchased by this user before adding, unmodified to the finished video.  It is matched third-party content that is owned or licensed by UMPG Publishing, although this still enables it to be shown on YouTube.