Jing! Where have you been all my life! This tool should have a permanent place on the task bar of every instructional designer’s desktop or laptop. As a new instructional designer, one of the first goals I had was to create content pages within courses where the information is presented in bite-sized chunks. One way to do this is to wrap text around pictures, or include images on the content page with small amounts of text. Anytime I need to capture a picture of an image I want to use for a course, I simply click on “the sun” icon that rests in the upper right corner of my laptop, select the plus sign in the sun’s ray, frame the image, and click the capture icon. Jing is a quick software download that will save you time as you design.
What are your favorite screen capture tools? Please share them in the comments area.
Hi Torria,
Thanks for your post; this is great information! I was just wondering if the text that you place on the image using Jing’s text tool is accessible via screen readers, such as JAWS. Also, can you caption the screencasting videos in Jing? We cannot create any videos without closed captioning at our institution, and I would love to know if anyone has found a screencast program that can do this. We use Captivate to produce web-based tutorials and can add captions in Captivate, but sometimes I want to just use a simple screencast and I can’t do that without providing the cc.
I suspect it is not accessible via screen readers because the text becomes part of the image. However, you could add the text as an “alt tag” to describe the image if that would help your purpose. Based on my experience, I am not aware that you can caption videos using the free Jing tool. With a little effort, you can upload a video created with Jing to YouTube and caption it there. If YouTube doesn’t accept the file format, you may have to use a free conversion tool like keepvid or fetchvideo. I respect your institutions position to create all videos with captioning.
I just use the Command+Shift+4 combo (on the Mac) then select what screen part I want. Nothing fancy, but easy peasy and no extra software required.
This is great. Thank you. I’m glad I found your blog through linked in. What other tools do you use for producing simple instructional videos made from images … I’m trying to do that just now.
Hi Bob — I also use Camtasia by TechSmith when I want to do more professional editing. I’ve also used Adobe Captivate in the past. Since the only output was flash based and Apple products won’t view flash, my online division chose to use Camtasia.
I love using Jing but for video screen capture I use SnagIt, also from Techsmith. Since SnagIt is a licensed product it has many more features than Jing but for quick screen capture, Jing does the job.
I know the Jing video tool is going away. Not sure about the Jing screen shot tool. Do you know if it’s being eliminated too? I like the snipping tool in Windows; but agree with you that Jing is better if you can add text to an image with it. I’ll have to give it a try!
Jing’s screen shot capability is not going away. Just Jing Pro. Regular Jing (free version) will continue to be available. Yea!
Torria, this is very interesting. I am new to the forum and also to some of the technology available today. I normally use MS snipping tool for this kind of thing, can you explain in what ways Jing is superior?
Silvia, thanks for asking your question. First, a tool is superior, in my opinion if it is easy to use and helps me accomplish my task. Both MS snipping tool and Jing meet that criteria. Jing does have a few additional features that would only make it superior IF you need those features. For example, Jing has a text tool that allows me to type short phrases or explanations on an image. As a result, I can save the text on the image as one object for use in instructional materials. You can also create short screencasting videos with Jing.