The tools I chose to examine for this week were Jing and Vibby. This tools both have to do with video creation, editing, and sharing. I will post a brief review of each below. Jing is a free app that functions on both Mac and Windows devices. It’s main purpose is to record, capture, and share images and videos taken on a device. It is created through Techsmith and functions with Screencast.com, just like other services like Snagit do. The app is active in the background of your device and can be accessed at an time from the upper right corner of the screen. There you can specify a section of the screen to capture or record. Then you can edit your selection with text, a freehand tool, and other options. After capturing and editing your image or video, you can get it quickly uploaded to screencast.com for easy sharing. You can also download it to your device to share in other ways. The app comes with a tutorial to show you the basic tools with videos to show step by step instructions for capturing, uploading and sharing content. Overall, it is incredibly easy to use, is not annoying to have open, and utilizes a platform that other common apps use. Based on my initial tests, image and video capture both work perfectly well. Uploading videos can be an issue due to size, but it can just as easily be saved to your device then shared via your Google Drive. The video/screenshot editing tools are nothing to write home about, but are still nice to have. I would equate them mostly to what you are able to do with Snapchat and other social media for editing photos and videos. So, even though it is nice to have the annotation tools for screenshots, I would still primarily describe this as a capture tool and not an editing tool. There are no real barriers for student use other than teaching them how the app works. It functions on most major devices and, I believe, is available as a chrome extension for the devices it is not friendly with. It is a simple app with only a few buttons and each button will title itself after you hover over it. It automatically uploads and copies a share link to the clipboard, so that is student friendly as well. Overall, it is just slightly more complicated than taking a normal screenshot but auto-uploads and gives some basic editing tools. So, the applications on the student end can be for sharing and submitting work easily. It could be used for peer tutoring as students can highlight their work in screenshots or short video clips. As a teacher, I can use it to easily send screenshots of test results or gradebooks for parents or students. Not a huge tool in terms of creation, but definitely has its merits for sharing information. Vibby is a free video platform that allows you to take highlights out of pre-existing videos. You link to or upload a video to Vibby and then can use a tool to create highlights. When finished, the viewer of the video will only see a compilation of the highlights. As the creator, you can also put comments or annotations with each highlight to title them or simply explain why it is a highlight. The app is web-based, so accessible on all devices with a browser. It has a tutorial for creating Vibby’s and has a search function to find existing Vibby’s. It connects with Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo and other popular video services. Overall, I found it easy to use and high access. The advantages of this app are huge. I can put multiple highlights on a single video. On youtube, I would need to get a time stamp link but then have no control over where the clip ends and I can only do one time stamp per link. Here, I can take an 8 minute video, pull out 4 highlights, comment on them, and give it to my students as a single video file. Doing that without this service would require downloading the video, editing it in iMovie to pull out the clips and condense them and then reupload them as a single file. In my practice, I would mainly use it to take pre-existing videos and highlight it to the “good” parts. This could be huge for project-based learning. For example, when planning a project about interior design, my team was searching for clips showing a room being remodeled. Some clips from extreme home makeover were useful, but 80% of the 7 minute video was not useful. Unfortunately, the 20% of useful video is scattered through the clip. It makes it difficult to show students in class because it required a lot of jumping around in the video. Sharing with students was not time efficient because they would need to watch the entire clip. So, this could be a great way to abridge longer entry videos or to highlight good bits of instructional videos. I can also see students using this to create their own highlights of instructional videos. Maybe I could have them highlight what THEY think were the most important steps. I could take a screencast of me solving a problem with mistakes intentionally made and have them highlight the mistakes. It actually could have some potential as an assessment tool if used creatively.
2 Comments
Dan
7/11/2017 04:39:29 pm
That was a really detailed of jing and informative. I am really interested in the vibby video platform. That could be a really useful tool for me with baseball as we watch video and to be able to highlight the most important things easily in a compilation and make comments and annotate, is great. I will check it out.
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james
7/11/2017 07:20:15 pm
Patrick,
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