Styles in MS Word – A Jing Video

I’m attending the PBWorks Camp for teachers, and this is my homework for my second week, a screencast made using Jing on how Styles in MS Word can help in writing long pieces such as academic papers or business reports:
2009-07-02_1211
I re-did this a number of times, dealing with –

  • fitting what I wanted to say to the time available
    • figuring out what to leave out
    • making sure my set-up worked
  • reducing the size of my Word screen so I could fit everything into a smaller frame
  • stumbling while I was recording

I really like learning from screen captures myself, so I enjoyed creating one

Jing (for Screencasting) and TweetDeck (for Twitter)

Summertime is playtime, and we’ve had record amounts of rain where I live, so my playing has been indoors. Here are a couple of tools I’ve been playing with.

Jing is a free and very easy screencasting tool. Because I’m thinking about Personal Learning Environments, that’s what I made this screencast on –

http://www.screencast.com/users/JoanVinallCox/folders/MERLOT/media/15cb112a-af72-4d8a-a7c0-f41d42041696

My problem is that by covering my full screen, I get a screencast the size of my full screen, which is too big. Twitter helped me get a partial answer. (I’m using TweetDeck because with it, I can see any replies immediately and I can separate the people I follow into different groups, for ease of following conversations.)

From TweetDeck, Alana James answers my request for help.
From TweetDeck, Alana James answers my request for help.

Alana’s advice allowed me to reduce the size of my Jing screen, but it only showed part of what I had captured. I wanted the whole image, but smaller. I have asked for help on Twitter several times previously and most often got a reply, so I consider it an important part of my PLE. It’s a place where I can ask and answer questions from peers.

So I’m playing, and thus learning how to use these tools, so when the weather is sunnier and/or I’m busier, I’ll be proficient and efficient in using them.