Parting ways with Jing - switching to Screencast-O-Matic

This week I received a couple of urgent emails from Screencast telling me that my Jing account was about to max out, and that if it did, people would no longer be able to access all the videos I had created on it. So I went to my Jing account and deleted old videos that I no longer needed. However, I then read the small print and realized that Jing has a limit on how many downloads can occur from one's Jing account -- and since my students and others have been watching my Jing "how to" videos more and more, my account was rapidly reaching the limit. Of course this is a clever scheme to get me to pay the $99 per year to enable to increase the storage I have on Screencast and the downloads. But I don't want to go there, as there are many other free options out there...

So, I just tried creating a video using Screencast-O-Matic, uploaded the video to my (free) YouTube account, and bingo -- it is really slick AND works better than Jing (the video I created in my last blog entry here -- on how creating an MP3 for Moodle from a Voice Memo -- I created using Screencast-O-Matic and uploaded to YouTube).

Screencast-O-Matic is really intuitive and easy to use. The first time I used it I had to download a plug in to enable it to work (just follow the prompts to do this), and then it was straightforward. Once I had created the video I had the option of  uploading the video to my Screencast-O-Matic account, uploading to my YouTube Account, or saving the video to my computer. I chose to upload to YouTube (and then I can link to it there or embed it into a page) and I also saved it to my computer.

Try it! I'm eager to hear from others out there about your experiences using Screencast-O-Matic, Jing and other video capture tools like Snagit (interestingly, Snagit is a product of TechSmith, which is the same company that makes Jing).