As educators I don’t need to tell you our time is always at a premium– especially when it’s time to respond to student papers.  There’s a delicate balance in the reviewing process: too much time spent giving exorbitant feed back (that might be glazed over anyway) robs us of precious research time and vise-versa.  For some time it seemed that the best solution was to provide brief written corrections coupled with discussion during class time, the down side being spending a class (or at least most of one) reiterating project requirements and writing techniques.

In an attempt to address this problem (and free himself from a near Sisyphean grading project) Dr. Jason Thompson asked me if we could find a better way.  Fortunately, our work for the Interactive Media Lab at the time had lead me to try to find a better way to explain complex visual elements of electronic media– screen recordings being the obvious solution.  Screen recordings are always preferable when showing someone a series of complex technical steps, but most screen recording applications lack intuitive interfaces, putting them outside the reach of convenience.  After some looking, I found TechSmith’s Jing, an easy to use screen recorder that supports Macs and Windows PCs.

By using Jing, Jason was able to very easily review sixty papers (two sections of English 1010) in just over five hours, as opposed to his previous record of five nights.  Moreover, Jason’s students were thrilled to receive vocal reviews of their work– a few even took the time to write letters of appreciation! Using Jing to record oneself viewing and commenting on a student paper saves hours of red ink and provides considerably more feedback to students.  The only prerequisite is that you must either collect papers electronically or have access to a scanner (preferably one with a document feeder).  Jing itself is free.

Using Jing allows us as graders to record a section of our desktop (specifically our PDF reader, or whatever you’re using to read student papers) and provide feedback by talking directly to a student as we use the computers mouse to draw attention to the area under discussion.  Each Jing video can be sent with one button to screencast.com or a course’s web page (if you institution allows FTP access for posting files).  Once sent to screencast.com the review video is given its own obfuscated URL that can be email to the student.  While the free version of screencast.com is capped at five minute recordings, we were surprised to see just how much verbal feedback one can give in five minutes.

Getting it installed and running takes approximately five minutes (with high speed internet) and installs in three steps:

  1. Download Jing at http://jingproject.com. It’s available for Mac and PC.
  2. Once your download is complete install Jing by:
    • PC users: Double click the EXE file and run the installer.
    • Mac users: open the DMG file and drag Jing to the Applications folder.
  3. Launch Jing.
Once installed Jing appears as a small yellow-orange sun in the top center or top right area of your screen on a PC or Mac respectfully.  Jing only has three buttons (told ya it was simple!): Capture, represented by a crosshair. History, represented by a Polaroid. And Settings, seen as a small gear.  It is important to note that all your grading videos can be recalled by clicking the History button, and Jing’s quit button is found under Settings.

Important Note: Jing will record your voice only. Jing does not use your webcam, so it’s safe to grade in your PJ’s :)

To draw a student’s attention to the area you’re speaking about, simply swirl around it with your pointer.  Scroll through the document normally as you work toward the end, narrating your journey through your students writing style until you’ve given all the feedback you can.

When you’re done recording (or you ran out of time, five minute limit on the free version remember) you will be shown a playback window.  You now have the option to review what you’ve said to the student.  Jason and I found it useful to watch a few of these to get a feel for what the student will see, but stopping to watch all of them isn’t really required.

If you’re not satisfied with your recording click the “X” in the lower left to delete the video, but if your recording conveys the message you wanted, click the upward facing arrows to automatically send the video to screencast.com.  The upload process can take a moment, as Jing videos are full resolution.  When its been successfully uploaded the URL of the video is automatically copied so all you have to do is start an email to the student, and hit “past”.

Of course, I could just show you:  http://screencast.com/t/ZTNlNzA1

(Silent snippet – click the link for a full version :D )

The final product is a URL formatted as: http://screencast.com/t/ZTNlNzA1 at which the student can view their feedback.  The final portion of the URL “ZTNINzA1” is randomly generated for each video, and is not simply incremented for each video you make.  This means that each students feedback is suitably obscured to prevent students from guessing each others feedback videos.  Security by obscurity, it’s handy.  Give Jing a shot and after a few videos, you’ll wonder how you ever graded without it.  For profHackers who want a little more out of Jing, here are a few tricks from Jingproject.com: Moving the Sun:

  • On a Windows computer, click on the sun, and while holding down the left mouse button move the sun to a different edge of your desktop.
  • On a Macintosh computer, hold down the Shift key and click on the sun. While holding down the mouse button, you can move the sun to a different edge of your desktop

Standard video sizes:

  • Hold the <Ctrl> key or <Shift>  key as you drag to snap to standard dimensions. Holding Ctrl  locks to a 4:3 aspect ratio and Shift locks to 16:9.
  • Standard, 4:3 (width:height) Popular dimensions include: 320×240, 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768
  • Widescreen, 16:9 (width:height) This is sometimes referred to as High Definition or HD. Popular dimensions include: 640×360, 800×450, 960×540, 1024×576, 1280×720, and 1920×1080

Send directly to YouTube, FTP, or Flickr

  • Go to Jing’s settings and select “Customize Jing Buttons…” in the window that pops up you can set your own blog’s FTP information, your Facebook account, Flickr, Twitter, or your YouTube account (YouTube in Pro Jing only).  These custom buttons will be seen right next to the screencast.com button we talked about in the tutorial.

There are hundreds of other screen recording tools, but none that I’ve seen are as easy to use as Jing.  Grading written papers with a screen recording tool isn’t initially  intuitive by any means, but once the idea settled the effectiveness of using Jing was undeniable.  Jason has been particularly fond of using Jing to grade student Power Points and projects that require heavy graphical elements.  Prior to using Jing, the best option was marking up a print out of a presentation, now he can grade the presentation while playing it.

Jing has really been a wonderful solution for the unique problem of time spent grading vs. quality of feedback.

Hope this helps,
~ Aaron.