Scratch Project

Scratch is a fun cartoon builder where you play the director. You decide which characters are in the show and what they do when, in relation to movement, body position and sounds.
I found scratch quite complicated to use as the buttons were confusing and frustrating. There are definitely holes in my Scratch knowledge which makes me think I might grow to like it over time as I become more familiar with it and its characteristics. I struggled to manipulate my 'sprites' in the way I wanted but I feel I took advantage of the time we had available to play.

I could use Scratch again but I would need to do a lot more 'research'/play with it as I could not hope to be successful in a classroom using Scratch with out actually understanding and enjoying Scratch myself. I could use Scratch to look at narrative with a class, first they would make their own simple plot and we would tackle it bit by bit with Scratch. Maybe doing one plot as a class before the children work on their own individual stories. It would be hard to monitor and help the children but I sense that they would really have fun with it and pick it up a lot quicker than me, making the lesson motivational and exciting to them.

Again my opinion is a bit premature as to really know how I feel about Scratch I would need to become much more familiar with it. I enjoyed it a bit, though I did not fully understand it and became frustrated when I could not manipulate my characters in the way I wanted.

Jing

Jing. This is my first experience with Jing, not only have I never heard of it but I have never seen anything quite like it.
It's a free technlogy that you download and use your gmail address and password to get access. It is a screen capture device that can be used live. Jing takes pictures (screen captures) and video captures of up to five minutes. Although I liked Jing and found it pretty interesting to play with I would not say it is one of my favourite technologies. It was fairly simple to use but now that my video is on my blog, it takes a long time to buffer.

I believe Jing would be a handy classroom tool as you could make videos of some kind of instuctions on the desktop then each child could look at them and refer to them whenever they wanted. What I did notice from my prac, is that the school's network was very slow so if Jing's videos are already slow to buffer it would be an unjustified amount of time before it was complete.
And as for screen capture, I can already do this without Jing. Though I did like how you could change the size and postion of the screen capture, when I do a normal screen capture I have to paste the capture to an empty paint screen to be able to cut the part out I require. Jing would save my time in this case.
Jing is fun and new to me, I can see my self using it to assist with easy screen capture.