Document Cameras
An article in today’s Skagit Valley Herald (for those of you not from the Northwest, that’s pronounced ska’-jit, not skaggit) looks at how one school has installed all new technology in their building, and the most immediate impact is the document cameras they have installed. This is certainly what I have been observing in working with teachers over the last couple of years. The great thing about document cameras is that they directly replace an existing technology (those awful overheads), they do much more than the replaced technology (no special overheads, just stick the object, book, paper or magazine under the camera), and they don’t take more than two minutes of training to be able to use. Teachers I’ve spoken to use them to
- Share student work without having to recopy onto the board or overhead
- Show problems from the textbook while discussing with students
- Share illustrations from the textbook for discussion
- Share articles from the morning paper for current events
- Demonstrate how to use a calculator (as described in the linked article)
Just another example of how simple tools can often be the best!