Oftentimes our users think up great new ways of using Screencast.com. Here's a comment that we received recently that I think demonstrates a unique way of using the service:

We've known for quite a while now that educators and students are using Jing to capture and share content in a variety of ways. TechSmith recently went to ISTE 2010 in Denver and experienced the distinct pleasure of having our customers actually present to other attendees how they use Jing to facilitate the learning process. Their presentations (see three recorded here) received acclaim from everyone who saw them.

Jing uses Screencast.com to host the image and video files that are created, and to deliver a shortened URL for users to paste into IMs, email messages, blog posts, Learning Management Systems, and other forms of communication.

But Screencast.com is a lot more than just a URL shortener. How do teachers and students use Screencast.com in their daily lives? And if they don't use Screencast.com on a regular basis, how could they? We know that instructors have content that they need to share with their students individually and as a class. Instructors need to restrict the viewing of secure content to specific students, and sometimes students need to submit content for instructors to review.

Screencast.com has evolved into a basic file system of sorts (with lots of room for improvement in that regard for sure), with various levels of privacy applicable to folders and playlists. Content that you upload to your main Library is publicly browseable meaning that if anyone knows your Display Name, they can point their Web browser at your Screencast.com account - for better or for worse. Browse to http://www.screencast.com/users/d.frazier and you'll see my publicly visible content, folders, and playlists, but you won't see the gobs of other folders and playlists in my account space that are "hidden" and "private".

When you assign a password to a folder to make it private, all the content you put in that folder is accessible to anyone that has that password. We do not have file-level permissions in place, meaning that you cannot assign a given video or image the status of private, hidden or public. That would get confusing quickly - how do you display a "public" file stored in a password-protected "private" folder? That's why, in the case of our user above, anyone with the password to a folder full of content can see all the content in that folder.

So how do you address the specific need that our user above is requesting - namely that a single student can only see content that is intended for their eyes only? Well, given the current state of Screencast.com's folder and playlist paradigm, an instructor could create a password-protected folder for each of their students and share that link and password with only the applicable student.

Content that is for only that student could be put in that folder and only that student would be able to see it. You would of course trust that student to keep their password private, but you could also change the password if you ever felt that trust was compromised.

A second method for making content available to only specific students is to create a playlist for each student and protect it with a password as you would a folder. Playlists can be made up of content from any folder in your Screencast.com account...private or public. In this example, an instructor could upload content to a private folder to which only she knows the password. She would then create a private playlist for each student, and then populate that playlist with content that's unique to them. She would share the password to that playlist with only the student that needed access.

Playlists afford a different method of content organization and display than folders because the contents of a playlist can come from many folders. Think of how you might organize a classroom using folders and playlists - content could be organized for storage securely in private folders by subject. A single semester of Economics 101 (something we ALL should take these days) could be represented by a playlist, titled by subject, year, semester, or whatever, but populated with content that's reused from previous semester's classes (and stored in a secure folder). Or you might create one playlist for a class that addresses many subjects with content stored in folders by subject.

These are just examples of how I can think of organizing and displaying content - I would love for classroom experts on the topic to give us all some insight on how they use Screencast.com to present content to their students.

-Dirk