Using Jing in language teaching

Have you ever used Jing for anything in your language teaching experience? Have you ever heard of it? I am asking you these questions because I have been suggesting the use of this nice tool in my educational technology workshops for over 7 years now. But it’s still interesting to notice that a lot of teachers all over the country have actually never heard of it, let alone use it.

But don’t worry, this is not an ad. Jing is actually a free tool by Techsmith, which makes it even nicer, isn’t it? 🙂 Well, the reason I chose to write a short post about it is because I believe it’s a tool that more and more teachers should learn about and effectively use it in their teaching.

Ok, but first things first, what is Jing? Well, Jing is a free screencaster. That means it’s a program that records your computer screen with whatever you are doing and saying. In the free version you can make videos of up to five minutes. All you need to do is download the program, run it, select the area of the screen you want to record and start recording your video.

Possible uses

And how can I use it in my language classes? Well, there are quite a few possibilities. On this post, I’m going to list and exemplify three simple possible uses of Jing in your language teaching lessons.

1. Feedback on writing tasks: If you have your students send their writing tasks in a digital format, Jing is an amazing tool for feedback and correction. Here’s a short video where I show you how you can easily do it.
2. Commented writing: Similarly to what I did in the feedback video, students can record themselves talking you through their piece of writing. Explaining, for example, why they structured it that way, etc.
3. Presentations: You can ask students to prepare a five min slide presentation about any given topic and record themselves presenting it to you. What’s interesting is that you can actually give them a feedback about their Jing work using Jing yourself.

 Benefits

And what are the benefits of doing these things with Jing?

1. When you give students an oral feedback on a piece of writing you are not only helping them with their writing, but also with their listening skills.
2. When you ask students to explain their piece of writing to you, you are encouraging them not only to speak about their writing, which is in a way integrating both skills, but also to reflect on their process of writing, the chosen structure, etc.
3. As for the presentations, if you establish, for example, a stage for every unit where students have to record a short presentation of what they have learned in that unit, this will not only develop students’ presentation skills and confidence in speaking, but it will also raise students’ awareness about their learning process.
4. Finally, I am all in favor of proper use of educational technology tools, because I believe this makes our teaching more modern and interesting. And I truly believe that the three suggested uses for Jing are great ways of effectively and constantly integrating digital tools into your teaching, making it more interesting and motivating to students, who are constantly connected and love to learn about interesting tools like this.

Well, I believe that’s what you needed to know about Jing to get started. Hope you liked it! Please, use the comments to share your experience in using Jing in you language lessons.

Eduardo Trindade

Eduardo is a freelance author and editor who has worked in the educational market, for schools and publishers, all over Latin America for over 25 years. Currently, besides being involved with content editing and production for Richmond projects, both in Brazil and in the UK, Eduardo is also a professor at Live University’s MBAs and the Managing Director of ASSIST Education Brazil, Richmond’s partner for the High School Dual Diploma solution. He is a journalist and holds an MBA in Business Management. eduardotrindade@me.com