If you are a teacher or regularly run workshops for other teachers in using new technologies and software, you can be sure that you have spent hours putting together how-to sheets or screencasts using a variety of different tools.

Included are Apple’s well known screen capture keyboard shortcuts or Grab, or a selection of other tools including iShowU, Snapz Pro, the more Web 2′y tools like GrabUp, Skitch or Screencast-O-Matic.

Jing is another tool and a free download. It is able to capture your screen, or a selection, as an image or movie and upload them directly to a location of your choice for embedding in to blogs and other web pages, or simply to store online for future use or sharing.

The process is simple and with the concept of  ‘Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere’ this app certainly makes it easy…

1. Select the option from the Jing menu.

2. Drag the cross hairs to select the screenshot area. This is one of Jing’s best features – the fact that all of the selection box lines extend right to the edges of the screen.

3. Selection the from the options of image, movie…

4. ..and then annotate with text, arrows, drawing or shapes and select from uploading to your free screecast.com or flickr, ftp’ing to a remote location, saving as a file or copying to the clipboard. Further options include uploading to use as link (URL) or to embed in your blog, the option used throughout this post.

5. The file will then upload and inform you that the code for embedding on your site is ready for pasting in. Very handy.

It is as simple as that.

If you choose to upload them to your free trial screencast.com account (easy to create from the Jing preferences – no need to visit screencast.com) you are able to upload 2GB of movies and images and have 2GB of bandwith available per month. More info on that here.

I have found that giving teachers and students screencast how-to movies instead of paper step-by-step guides has reduced time spent on preperation for teaching these skills as well as reducing the time spent going over skills with individual teachers. Just make them easily available on the web available and remind people how to access them.

Rating:  out of 5

Pros: Free, integrated upload and embeding, easy to use, intuative, supporting website

Cons: Weird default ‘sun’ controller (thankfully you can change this to the input menu), no moveable (follow the mouse) movie capture