Creating Tutorials with Jing

What’s the next best thing to explaining something in person? The answer is…a video! You’ve heard the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, well, imagine how much a video can be worth.

There’s a really easy and powerful tool you can use to create video tutorials. You can record what’s going-on on your screen and add your voice along the way. Easily!

I’ve created some step-by-step tutorials with the help of screenshots, text, arrows, and shapes. This is great if your user wants to print them out, take notes, or if you have a limited amount of storage space. However, they take sometimes longer to prepare and put together than recording and explaining through a quick video.

The tool I’m talking about is Jing, a product from TechSmith that's so easy to use and to share. That’s not all, you will also find a number of helpful tutorials on how to use it. 
View of the Jing tools that show on your desktop.

You can download the application for free and record videos that are up to 5 minutes long. Hey, who wants to see a longer video anyway? I think it’s best to have short videos, showing small chunks of information.

The best thing I just found out, is that the videos can be shared via mail, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and you can even embed the html code anywhere. Just what I wanted! I am so excited because today I was creating a tutorial and I learned about this, so I decided to share with you.

You can still share via a URL, after the video has been uploaded to Screencast. A content hosting site, that offers 2 Gb of free storage space or download as a swf file.

The teachers love it when I send them a Jing tutorial on how to do something. But what they like the most is having the option to watch it again and again, as needed. They say it’s like having me there whenever they need me. How about that? Try it yourself you’ll like it too.

Cheers!

 P.S. Here's a sample Jing tutorial as a URL and as an embedded video.

http://screencast.com/t/7M7kK84GdT


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