A Little Birdie Told me...

I am rarely an early adopter. Twitter was created just over five years ago, and references to it are about as common as the call sign on many radio stations, but until six months ago I was not counted among its 200 million users. My impression was that Twitter was a collection of trivial comments on what people had for breakfast and other things that truly do not interest me. Last year my feelings about Twitter began to change, and over the past six months Twitter has become invaluable for me as a teacher.

At the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers conference this year I met teachers who were trying interesting ideas in their classes, and I wanted to keep track of them and hear about their teaching. Many of these teachers were active on Twitter, so on May 13 I signed up for an account and began to read some their comments on teaching. Since then the list of those I “follow” on Twitter has slowly grown, and a number of times I have directly used their recommended resources, websites, and teaching strategies in my classes.

Document Camera Ideas

Last year I experimented with using a webcam in class. I projected demos and activities that were either too small (or in one case too large) for a whole class to see clearly, and occasionally something out of the text book. It was kind of a basic document camera, and for my purposes was good enough.

Recently my school received several higher quality cameras, so to help roll them out I collected a few more use cases for the school bulletin

WHAT IS A DOCUMENT CAMERA?

A “document camera” is a small video camera attached to a stand so that it can look down at objects or papers on a table. The image is projected directly through an LCD projector, or though a computer attached to an LCD projector. Some document cameras have extra features like a zoom lens, light, or auto-focus to improve image quality.

WHY WOULD I USE A DOCUMENT CAMERA?