My very own YouTube with Screencast

A lot of thoughtful observers of the changing world are seeing the so-called YouTube phenomenon as being a very significant development in how people communicate. The other day I had a sore back, so I looked up YouTube looking for lower back pain. Within 10 minutes I had seelected one of a number of videos about this, and was on the floor, with laptop in view, watching and imitating a young woman showing a couple of exercises. I don't know who she is, but from the way she spoke, I expect that she is a physiotherapist with the inclination to share some good advice. The pain is gone by the way.

A friend had a medical problem and found a set of videos made by a specialist who is sick and tired of going through the same spiel over and over a gain with patients, so he made a couple of videos complete with models and charts. And shared it with the world. Video is not the only way to share ideas, but it is a very good one. What is really new is that people with something to say like those mentioned above, now have a low cost and simple way of connecting with either large or with specialist audiences, and the power of internet search makes the connection between giver and receiver very easy to make.

So, here is a new kind of site that helps individuals join the sharing business in a very serious way. Screencast provides huge storage space online and some simple tools to manage sharing of all kinds of files. For $7US a month the user gets 25 Gb of storage space! Videos, still images all sorts of files and documents can be stored. It is designed primarily as a video streaming site, so an individual or organisation like a school can use this as a place to store and deliver a large body of resources. Files can be placed in folders that are public open to selected people or are private.

A companion service offered by Screencast is the amazing Jing application which is a high quality screen capture application. It two clicks the user can capture action on the screen and provide a voice-over commentary of what is going on. Very powerful for web tutorials.

Here is a short example of a Jing screen capture - of just a section of a screen: it took about 3 minutes to go through the whole process including saving and sharing it. The quality of the capture is perfect, and Jing is free.

Here is my little Screencast public folder with a few little examples for you to browse.

There is a big difference between giant sharing sites like YouTube and  a personal site like Screencast, but both are part of the same story: that video sharing is becoming easier and more powerful. 

Tags: collaboration as pedago digital storytelling video showme
Posted at 10:10AM Jun 28, 2008 by John Travers  |