If a picture is a worth a thousand words...

...how many words is a video worth?

Teaching online can offer challenges that are easily addressed in the traditional classroom.  This summer I'm teaching a research and writing course online and have been encouraging my students to use EndNote or similar products to organize their research sources and store their evaluative annotations.  A few weeks ago one of the students had questions about using this software.  If this were a traditional classroom setting I would have simply demonstrated the software in class.  This is not as easy in the online classroom (but not as difficult than in the past).

There are tools out there that can be used to create videos capturing desktop interactions.  These tools are robust and not too expensive and I use one of these tools (Camtasia Studio) for my formalized demonstrations to supplement my undergraduate courses.  There are times when I don't want to spend the time creating, producing, and posting a video when I just need a short demonstration without any bells and whistles.  In situations like these I have been using Jing.

Jing is free software that records video captures of the computer desktop that can be posted quickly to any learning management system or website.  Using this software I am able to quickly demonstrate the software, save the video, and share it with my students.  The same vendor also offers Screencast as a free service where I can save my video demonstration and link or embed the video to share with my students.  Once the video is created, it takes me approximately three minutes (depending on the length of the video) to save the video to the Screencast server, capture the URL and post the URL to my course.  Very fast!

While I still prefer the control I have over the video production when I use Camtasia Studio, I like the quick and easy approach Jing offers for these impromptu video captures.  I find myself creating these same impromptu videos for my face-to-face students to help them navigate through some of the software we use in class.

Jing and Screencast are both free but there are also paid versions of these two services.  They are pretty inexpensive and, if I continue to use these services on a regular basis, I will most likely purchase the "professional" versions of the service.

I wonder how long it would take to write out instructions for the same demonstration I recorded in Jing.  In this case, a video is probably worth 10,000 words.