Jing: free screen capture for practice IT training

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2009. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Do you want to improve the IT training in your practice? Do you find yourself showing the same things over and over to different people? Do you have some power users whose knowledge you would like to capture and share?

I’ve found a great piece of software called Jing that will help you do all of this and even better - it’s free!

Once installed it appears as a small yellow sun at the edge of your screen. Clicking on the sun gives you three options: an options menu, a history list of everything you have captured and the main capture button. Clicking on this brings up some crosshairs. This allows you to select either the whole screen, a window or even part of a window. When selected you get a choice of photo or video.

If you just want to take a screenshot you can do this easily; once captured you can annotate it with text and arrows. You can save it to an online service or to the hard drive or clipboard. If you get error messages popping up on your screen this is a great way of capturing them, and you can easily paste the image into an email.

Capturing video is just as easy and this is where it comes into its own. It records everything you do. If you have selected the whole screen it will capture everything; if you have only selected one window, only this will record. This is incredibly useful for capturing hints and tips from one application without clutter to pass on to others. People can watch the recording as many times as they want.

If you have a microphone you can even narrate over the screen, explaining what you are doing. All your mouse movements are recorded so you can highlight areas of the screen by pointing to them.

You can save the video to an online service like YouTube to ease sharing, or you can just save it to a disk. For anything that might contain patient-sensitive information this is the best option.

Now all your experienced staff can record their favourite tips for others to watch. You can build up a library of tips. You could even share it amongst practices. I’m working on a recording of how to do a referrals audit.

It is limited in some features. You can’t easily edit the video or annotate it, and it’s limited to five minutes. The £800 Camtasia will do everything, but for short recordings you can’t beat it. Give it a go.