Jing - Marvellous

A while ago I asked my fellow LT's on any suitable screen recording software (both Video and Stills), Dominic Martignetti from Faculty of Education suggested Jing.

And what a suggestion, it works amazingly is very intuative to use and speeds up tasks such as creating tutorials and with a direct upload feature it means no large emails being sent can't think of anything else to say about it apart from download it, try it and smile...

I've set mine up so if I press "CTR + J" it brings up a crop box as sown below:



Once you have selected your area of interest (btw your not limited to just these boxes, Jing will also recognise areas of interest such as the content area of your web browser etc). You then have the option to capture image or video:



Amazingly once your finished capturing you then get the option to save to your local machine or to upload to their servers. If you go pro you can upload right to youtube, or save as mp4's. None pro users are free, and you can still capture photos and vidoes just you can't save as mp4 which would be nice but its no biggy.

Serious thumbs up for this...

M-Learning just some playing

I have future possible projects with the possibilities of having a M-Learning add-on/aspect to them, and have been looking at the different possibilities of developing for them. The biggest hurdle as with all E-Learning projects I find is keeping the project generic and open to as many people as possible.

With M-Learning the problem is catering for the mass amounts of different types of Mobile devices people possess. Which leaves 3 possible platforms to develop a application/learning resource in:

• Flash
• Java
• HTML

Flash: With mobile flash growing in popularity and Adobe now offering it free for mobile phone operators to offer it with their phones this is defiantly an platform to watch flash has obvious advantages to offer such as easy application development and even simple patching over from current Flash projects. Flash is my preferred option to use in any development, however it lacks popularity within phones which is on the change but could still be too early to use.

Java: Has been available on phones since before phones existed... probably, is a harder platform to develop in, is very versatile, supports 3d, bluetooth the possibilities of Java seem endless. However its biggest flaw is Microsoft hates Java, with it being a major rival to its own platform, Microsoft as a result doesn't directly support its use on Windows Mobile devises (PDAs/Mobiles). However there are a number of 3rd party applications which apparently allow you to run Java on a windows mobile device... I've not had any success doing this and as a result I'm not happy supporting this as a method for students.

HTML: Simply creating a load of offline websites could be a very simple yet effective method as it will be free! Which is the important thing, and will be highly adaptable to work on all manor of devices of all shapes and sizes. However it is a tad boring!

To summarise... I think if these upcoming projects are to have an M-Learning spin and its to a mass of students with unknown devices then I think a simple HTML interface is needed which can be down/upsized to the devices.

However if the types of devices the students are using is known then this could open up the possibilities of creating a more interesting resource, say for example the masses of Cepple PDA's where made available to the students then flash could be installed on these devices and as a result some interesting resources could be developed... Flash + Touch Screen = SCORE!