Improve This!

Here's another open letter to document camera manufacturers everywhere. 

You're constantly improving your visualization products by increasing hardware features, capabilities, and performance. That's fine. But one area that seems to lag in the visualizer industry is its software.

Sometimes I think that the software that is packaged with many visualizers was created cheaply and without much forethought. Sometimes visualizer software has an archaic “look and feel”-- appearing like something created two decades ago; something not at all as appealing as the look and feel of modern websites or current software. (I served as a judge for Technology & magazine’s 2013 annual software awards and remain a current software reviewer for T&L and other journals, and I know when software has anachronistic look to it.)

Document camera manufacturers would do well to stop upgrading their hardware at such a brisk pace, and instead concentrate on their software interface. To date, the most attractive, easy-to-use, and fresh-looking controlling software interfaces for document cameras that I have worked with belong to these companies: Recordex, Lumens, and HoverCam. Software should not be an afterthought. Just sayin’

Three Things

What are the three most important ways you can use your classroom visualizer?

In the spirit of doing simple things that work when using document cameras in classrooms, here are three succinct ideas to remember and implement in your classroom:

Use Color

Don't step your document camera back to the days of overhead projectors! Use color to highlight, attract, organize or shape meaning into a lesson.

Use Immersive Images

Don't show small pictures, cartoons or object. Magnify them to the point that they fill your entire classroom screen. Full-screen, rich, immersive images really hook students, drawing them into the learning at hand.

Involve the Students

Step away. Imagine ways for your students to use the visualizer. The better you get at this tool, the more the kids will use it--not you!