After seeing Jing as the top recommendation in a list of teaching tools, I decided to look into it. This two-minute video gives a good introduction to what the tool can do. In a nutshell, Jing makes it very easy to capture a screenshot or a video and post it to the web. I tried it out with this screencast of the Inequality Calculator software I helped write and use all the time.
At first I thought I had to select the desktop region around the program I wanted to make a video of, but then I found that if I click inside the program window with the cropping tool Jing will automatically select a rectangle around the window.
Posting your videos to the web and getting a link is easy. It took a little more work to figure out how to get the code to embed the video in a web page. This page shows how to do it. You don’t get an “embed” button by default, but the video on that page shows you how to create one.
It seems you have to choose whether you want an ordinary link or embedding code. If you choose the latter, it’s not obvious how to recover the former. If you look in the HTML code Jing generates, you’ll see something like this.
<param name="flashVars" value="thumb=http://.....content=http://....swf">
Select everything following content= down to and including .swf. There are several other URLs in the embedding code, but only this one works by itself.