Jing is a lot like Twitter at first: when you try it you might think, “Interesting, but when would I ever use it?” Then you start playing around with it, see how others are using it and you’re hooked.

This is a guest blog post by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast.

Essentially, Jing allows you to take a quick (5 minute max) screen capture (still or video) of whatever you’re doing on your computer. If you take a video screencast you can:

• save the video to your computer as a .swf or .mp4 file (.mp4 is only available if you have a Jing Pro account),
• save the video to Jing’s servers (Jing is owned by TechSmith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Jing will send you a URL to the video which you can share however you like, or
• send the video to your YouTube account.

If you’re having a problem doing something with a program on your computer for example, you could take a quick Jing video and then when Jing sends you the URL (takes about 2-3 minutes), you email/IM the link to someone who can see exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s how you might use Jing with your Sprout: in my previous post I showed how a teacher could use a Sprout to handle all those annoying writing errors (like confusing “then” and “than”) which crop up every year in students’ papers. A teacher could create a Sprout with buttons for each typical writing error, and then link the buttons to a page that contains written examples of how to write properly or links to YouTube videos in which someone else explains how to avoid the writing error.

You could also use Jing to explain things to your students yourself and then embed that video into your Sprout.

To embed a Jing video into a Sprout, get yourself a free Jing account and play around with Jing. Make a video and either:

• save the video to your YouTube account, or
• save your Jing videos to your computer in .swf format.

In your Sprout, open Assets, click “Add Assets” and then upload the .swf from your computer. At that point you can just drag the Jing .swf file to your Sprout or just click the green plus sign below the Jing file and it will be added to your open Sprout.

Couple of things to note:

• When you make your Jing video you’ll probably want to make it small. Hold down the shift key when you’re determining the size of your Jing video and you’ll get some options you’ll probably want to use.
• The Jing video will play find, but it will use its own controls in your Sprout – it won’t work within the Sprout video component unless you upload it to YouTube and embed it from the YouTube URL.

Give it a try. Here’s a quick  video that shows how I combined Sprouts with Jings:

Works great.

- Michael Britt

I’ve been a college teacher for about 20 years now and I wish Sprout Builder was around when I started out.  I discovered Sprouts a few years ago when I needed a widget for my website and I’ve seen the capabilities of Sprouts grow to the point where I’m convinced it could be the kind of teaching tool educators have been asking for for a long time.  There are a lot of potential uses for Sprouts in education, but I’m really excited about this one: creating online projects.

I’m a psychology teacher, and despite what you might think, psychology is not all about Freud.  Like any science, psychology is about conducting experiments and surveys.  When the internet blossomed in the mid 90s I wondered whether student projects could finally go online.  Typically students choose easy to set up studies (like asking people to compare the taste of Coke vs. Pepsi, or to memorize lists of words….snore….) and they ask 10-15 of their friends or dorm-mates to act as subjects.  After a while that gets pretty boring for them and for the teacher.

What are the alternatives for teachers who want students to create fun projects where they can also collect data from a lot of people?  Well, as I see it we’ve had these options:

• HTML: you can create an online project in which participants go to a web page to read instructions, look at pictures, etc., and collect data from them by filling in HTML forms, but that takes a sophisticated knowledge of HTML and perhaps also of Javascript.  For the busy teacher, this is not going to happen.
• Adobe Flash: I love Flash.  I’ve been programming in Flash and actionscript for years.  And that’s what it takes – years – to be good enough at Flash to create an online project.  Flash carries a very steep learning curve.  Teachers are content experts, not developers.  So Flash is not the answer either.
• Software to Create Online Projects: there are packages educators can buy to create projects.  These can be easier to use than HTML or Flash, but the downside is that they are very expensive (upwards of $1,000), they are usually designed for professional researchers, and they are overkill for the average teacher who just wants students to easily create interesting projects, or for the teacher – distance ed or on the ground – to create online lesson plans.

That’s where I feel Sprout Builder comes in.  You can inexpensively create online projects without any coding knowledge.  I’ve created two of them for my podcast, The Psych Files, that were fun to make and I think are good examples of just the beginning of what can be done with Sprout Builder.  Here’s what Sprout Builder has that teachers and students need:

• Multimedia: Sprout builder let’s you drag and drop audio, video and images onto its “palette”. Now we’re no longer limited to doing projects with just lists of words.
• Multiple “Conditions”: students can use pages in Sprout builder and buttons to control exactly what participants in a project are allowed to see and do.   Although participants won’t be able to taste Coke or Pepsi, I think I we’ve been down that road enough times.  Now we can do projects that are more involving.  Here’s an example of a rather simple project I created for The Psych Files podcast:

• No Programming Skills Required: No HTML, JavaScript or Actionscript to learn.  Navigation from one “condition” (page) to another is easily done with drag and drop buttons and then selecting the actions of the buttons from a menu.
• Data collection: Here’s what really solves a big stumbling block for teachers: how can students gather real data from participants around the world?  This is what is so cool about what Sproutbuilder has recently done: integrated with Google Forms and PollDaddy.  Both of these sites can collect student data and are easy to set up.  Google Forms is of course free and you’ll get everything you need from PollDaddy’s free account.
• Publish to the Web: Most teachers are using blogs and Sprout Builder publishes to most of blog pages in one click, without anyone needing to know any code. Ridiculously easy.  With a tiny bit of HTML coding knowledge, the embed code is easily placed into a web page.  Here’s an example of a lesson/homework I made in Sprout and placed on a web page.
• Inexpensive: finally, teachers can create three sprouts for free, or get an inexpensive educator account to make as many Sprout as they want.

I could go on, but then you’ll think I work for the company.  I don’t.  I’m a teacher and I see a wonderful future for Sprout Builder in the education space.

Learn more about Michael Britt’s project, The Psych Files Podcast — Psychology podcast and resources for students and educators.