I have been looking for some screencasts programs to use for my upcoming summer workshop. Screencast are useful for tutorials, for illustrating powerpoints presentations, to explain a concept or document, for making short presentations, etc. It can also assist the instructor to add additional learning materials and extend the class time beyond the confines of the classroom. There are many tools one can use, like Jing, Camtasia, Screenr, Wink, ScreenJelly, etc. I want to share with the community a wikipedia site that compares all software for screencasts, from free to commercial ones. 

I tried a couple of these programs some are good, some are OK, some… not so useful.  These are the main problems I discovered: 1) once you record your screencast the time to upload the file into a server (also youtube) is infinite, it takes twice as much to upload it than to record it.  2) Some of the software lasts a very short time (the free versions) and records for only 5 minutes — in the case of Jing — and 3 minutes for ScreenJelly. 3) The other limit is that you can’t edit the sound, so if the phone rings after 10 min into your project you have to start all over !

I found a WIKI resource page for screencast, I hope you will find it useful enough to want to try some of these programs.