Screencast
- Using Weather Underground -
Screencast Experience
Since I access the Weather Underground site, wunderground.com, a lot for weather forecasts, I decided that it would a natural to screencast. I easily downloaded the Jing application (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.htm) which prompted me to establish a screencast.com account which I did. I wrote and practiced the script, then turned on Jing, capturing most of the screen, tried the script, and saved it (about 4 minutes) locally. Since that consumed about 55 Mb of space, I decided to cut some of the script and reduce the screen size captured by Jing. Trying the script again, I was pleased that it was now down to about 19 Mb. I uploaded the cast using Jing, but then found that only the HTML address was available and the embedding HTML code, required for our ePortfolio, was not. After further research, I discovered that one must customize Jing (on the Jing sun, More->Preferences->Customize Button->Create New Button) to create a customized upload which would generate the embedding code which could be pasted. So I generated another screencast and upload it using the customized upload and that did generate the embedding code which worked in my ePortfolio. When I put it in my Weebly portfolio, I modified the embedding HTML to reduce the viewing screen size to 600 x 500 pixel to make it more useable in my portfolio and hopefully still be large enough to be viewed. Although I finally generated the embedding HTML, I found that Jing did not generate the HTML address at the same time. But I was able to logon to screencast.com and was able to determine the HTML address: http://www.screencast.com/t/ZjW6XAAiEXZF
I found the Jing application easy to use once I understood the process. How to generate embedding code was not covered in the basic Jing tutorial. I found that writing the script was more difficult than I anticipated. It was difficult to define a simple procedure when the wunderground site has so many options and so many moving parts on the screen. Things like mouse pointer movement are hard to script and I found that it was easier and smoother to move the screen up with the arrow keys rather than the slide bar, saving the mouse for button selection. I also found it hard to type and talk at the same time, so I did not. Clearly an easy and smooth action flow is critical to a successful screencast. I doubt that I will use screencasting again, but it was certainly an interesting experience.