Thanks to my wonderful readers, I have solved my screencasting dilemma. To begin with, I am thoroughly impressed with TechSmith’s Jing. It is extremely simple to use and produces very high-quality videos with very small file sizes. And it’s free. It’s not what you need if you’re going to want to edit the files, create interactive training, or add other bells and whistles, but it’s perfect if you want to do a simple screencast easily and well. My sole complaint about it is that it’s just a little sluggish on the four-year-old Dell laptop. (We haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. Did I mention that it’s cross-platform?)
Jing can save files to anywhere, but we’ve decided to use its built-in one-click integration with Screencast.com. You get 200 MB of free storage with Jing, which probably isn’t enough for Kathy’s course, but it’s enough to get started. After that, the next step up is $6.95/month for 25GB. Seven bucks a month is a little more than we wanted to pay, but it’s well worth it for the ease-of-use and the peace of mind knowing that Techsmith (the company that created Camtasia) is running it. Basically, Kathy will create a private folder for each student. It should be very simple. The files play in Flash, so there should be minimal technological barriers, and the text comes across crystal clear. This obviously isn’t a particularly accessible solution but, since this is all one-on-one feedback, Kathy can make other accommodations for individual disabled students. And if she wanted to store other files in there for students (e.g., audio, or even a Word or PDF document), her account would handle that too. It’s not limited to Flash video.
There are a couple of annoyances. For example, Jing only saves to the “Jing” folder in her Screencast.com account, so she’ll have to go into the web interface and move each file over to the students’ private folders after uploading. That significantly reduces the value of the one-click integration. Also, the web interface for Screencast.com is a bit clunky; common tasks take more clicks than they should. And finally, it would be nice to enable email subscriptions on folders so that people could be notified when new files are added. But these are all relatively minor. Overall, I’m convinced that this will work well.
I’ll keep you posted as the semester progresses.
Hey Jing user. That sounds a lot like what I am using with students schoolweblockers.com
Each student gets 100 MB storage space and each teacher has up to 4 gigs. It’s a nice tool that allows students to turn things in electronically and helps teachers track who has turned what in when, etc. . . We use it for both sotrage and for assessment as it allows comments to go back and forth between users w/o email. THe cost is pretty low right now as it’s a new company.
Hi, just for reference, as you have already solved the problem. But have a look at Voice Thread: http://voicethread.com/
At first sight, it looks pretty cool and full of usage possibilities.
Voicethread is a wonderful tool but, again, it’s not quite suited to this particular use. Kathy wants to be able to use the editing tools in Word and actually work with the student’s document while adding the voice annotation. So, for example, she might add a word in the underlying text, change the font color to indicate a grammatical error, etc. She will then provide the student both with the marked up Word document and with the audio/video of her commenting on the paper as she is marking it up. You could fake something very roughly approximating what she can communicate this way using Voicethread instead, but it would be a lot more work.
Now, having multiple students comment on one student’s document would be a more appropriate use of Voicethread.
Glad it’s working for you!