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.