A New Kid on the Block

The eInstruction ShareView

eInstruction, the audience response and interactive white board manufacturer recently entered the document camera market with a low-cost ($139), portable document camera offering.

Coupled with its Workspace Connect software, the ShareView document camera can not only display classroom resources, it can allow annotation via student mobile devices running their app.

Interestingly, when folded up, the ShareView can serve as a webcam for web conferencing or headshot recording.

Still, the document camera market is so crowded these days, it will be quite interesting to  see if this merely becomes a nice add-on to their interactive whiteboard and clickers ecosystem, or if it will be able to stand on its own.

iPads as Doc Cams

The newest craze in document cameras at the FETC and TCEA conferences this year is the attempt to turn the iPad into a document camera. Some of the products I found on the exhibit floor included those featured throughout this page. As you can see, they come in every imaginable size, shape, and color.

One of the products, produced by Belkin, come with an app to give document camera software functionality to the concept. Max Cases also offered an interesting table-grip approach. 

What do you make of this trend? Will it last? For now, just take a look at this interesting phenomenon. I will comment on the relevance of this development in a future post after I interview lots and lots of teachers about the concept.

(Note: I have completed my extensive teacher interviews and have posted the results here.)

 

      

There's an App for That

Something definitively new has arrived on the document camera scene. It’s the EduCam Classroom Viewer App. EduCam broadcasts live images from a Ken-A-Vision FlexCam USB document camera or microscope to a classroom set of mobile devices. This app supports 1:1 viewing, capturing, annotating, and sharing of document camera images. Students can even complete and submit assignments digitally for immediate assessment. It supports both Android-based devices or iPads.

• You can read more about the EduCam app for the iPad here and the Android OS here.
• For a technical video on exactly how the EduCam App is set up, click here.