Enhancing Conversations with Jing...

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screenshot_01Jing is a tool that allows you to capture still and video images of your desktop. One way of looking at this tool is as a screencasting tool, but it also incorporates a feature that allows you to share your capture instantly via a link. This can be useful say in a chat session with a friend. Maybe you want to explain or demo a tool you are discussing. Using Jing you can quickly invoke the tool, capture some video along with your narration. When Jing is finished capturing and processing the video, it also places a URL to the video on your clipboard that you can paste into your chat client (or Twitter, or email...) and share with the person you are talking to. The other day Steve Burt and I were on iChat and I used it to illustrate how it works. It was much easier just to show him. EXAMPLE Screencast... I can see using this quite a bit with my staff. Especially when one of the printers goes down and they need to select another one... :-) The ability to easily capture, post, and then send the URL is pretty slick.

The Jing web site explains it this way...

“Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”

By way of Tony Vincent via Twitter...

Google SketchUp For Dummies

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Google SketchUp For Dummies, by Aidan Chopra, is out and available for purchase. Chapter one is available as a free download, and in addition the author has posted on YouTube, video tutorials that accompany the book. Also interesting is that he has posted a listing of corrections. Basically things that are incorrect in the printed book with links to the corrected information. Related posts: Building a Community with Sketchup and Google Earth...

New Cameras

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Cob Bench PanoramaRecently we received the last of our equipment from a digital storytelling grant. The grant provided us with 15 MacBooks, and assorted video and still cameras. The last items we received are the Canon HV20 High Definition camcorder and a Canon Powershot TX1. The HV-20 is charging as I write this and I plan play with it soon.

The Canon Powershot TX-1 is a hybrid 7.1 mega-pixel still and HD video camera with a 10x zoom. It can shoot at 30 fps in 720p high definition widescreen (16:9 aspect) and is about the size of a deck a cards. I've been playing with it for a few days and am finding it to be quite impressive. Some of the reviews have mentioned that the layout of buttons and controls are a bit cumbersome, but I'm not finding any problems with it. It has a component jack so it can be plugged into a HDTV for playback, and comparing it to the HV20. For editing I just download the stills and video to iPhoto and then use iMovie to grab and edit the video. Now that things have slowed down a bit at school, maybe I'll throw together a short video.

links for 2007-07-25

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