Screen Capture - Jing v.s. Print Screen

There are many ways to capture your screen so I will discuss two methods in this blog that may be valuable during this course.

The directions at the bottom of the RSS Reader assignment have you downloading and using Jing, a TechSmith product, to capture the RSS Reader screen. The end result should have been a URL to the image that was captured by Jing and then placed on their server. Placing the URL into your document would allow the viewer to click on the link and the image would use the Internet to display your screen capture. It is important to be able to download this software and use it for capturing an image and then later for capturing a video recording that you will make. The introduction to the Master’s program that Leigh Wolf placed in the sessions folder of Angel was created and captured using Jing. My introduction video and the session introduction audio recordings are made using Camtasia Studio, another product of TechSmith.

The second method that is commonly used is an operating system built in screen capture. You press the Print Screen button on your keyboard and the operating system places the image of the whole screen into its clipboard. The clipboard and image are not visible to you at this point. Once you Ctrl + v or Paste the image into a document or photo editor such as Paint or Photoshop, the image will be visible. To select the top most window that is open, so you don’t capture the whole desktop, you choose Alt + Print Screen and then Paste. This method, as opposed to the Jing URL method, adds the whole image to your document which can take up a lot of space and cause your document to be very large. The image is not always extremely clear so you need to decide if quality of image is important when choosing your screen capture method.

I would spend the extra time going through the TechSmith tutorials on using Jing. They do a good job of demonstrating, using short videos, how to capture and save the image.

These skill set using Jing is necessary if you plan to continue with the Certificate courses and complete the endorsement or master’s program.

Blog made viewable by anybody

Make sure your blog can be read by anybody. This does not mean that anyone is an author or that anyone can make a comment without your approval.

Go to Dashboard, Settings, Permissions and select the default of Anybody can view this blog.

Assigning relevant keywords in Blogger

Question: How to add tags to a blog?

Answer: The two requirements that address this topic are…

1.      Organize your posts with your own tagging system

2.      Assign relevant keywords so your post can be found more easily

I don’t believe you need to add meta tags to the code at this point. These meta tags would allow for an Internet Search Engine to find your blog.

The goal at this point is to organize your blogs within your own site.

You can add labels to your blog posts, allowing you to click on a keyword to find all of your posts with the same label.

Here are some directions for this action…

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44498

Adding this to your sidebar as a Gadget is helpful.

Google Docs Questions

I would like to share questions that I am asked during this course that may be helpful to others in the class.

Question: When I save my resume as a pdf file the formatting (indentations) changed. Is there a way to keep it the same as it is in Google Docs?

Answer: I did a little searching about creating pdf's using GoogleDocs and it appears to be problematic. (see the two articles below)

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Docs/thread?tid=746077a2433f240f&hl=en

http://broncobytes.boisestate.edu/2010/01/20/a-few-words-on-using-google-docs/

You may want to create the pdf using Word if you have Adobe Writer (you can download a free version for 30 days) or using a free on-line program such as Cute pdf http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/Writer.asp or any of the other programs offered on-line.

Question: I was wondering if my friends should be editing my resume.

Answer: The requirement reads... "c.Invite some trusted peers to help you edit/give feedback to your document (grant editing permission for collaboration).". If you are uncomfortable with other people viewing your resume, you do not need to complete this part of the activity. You should be familiar with granting editing permission and viewing other viewers comments.

Question: Is there a way to see where page breaks are in Google Docs?

Answer: In the Print Preview, you are able to see where the page ends and the next page begins. If you want to control where the page break is located, you will need to insert a Page Break under the Insert menu.

Welcome

Welcome to my CEP 810 blog!

Here you will be able to view a course calendar with due dates and additional reminders about course events.

You can also share helpful resources with everyone in the class.

Enjoy the journey into Educational Technology!