Diluting the Dream

I have noticed an unseemly shadow slowly overtaking the document camera industry over the last half-dozen ed-tech conferences, a trend that deeply bothers me: some companies, most recently Aver Information and Lumens, seem to be disengaging from their core mission of selling visualizers and promoting visual teaching and learning. Instead, they are refocusing and retooling their business in favor of display sharing software, school video security systems, or even video conferencing.

Why are they doing this? Evidently, the document camera market has been shrinking, as it approaches 60% deployment in U.S. classrooms. They need to feed the revenue zombies with additional profit centers it seems. They need to survive.

Why does this trend deeply concern me?  Well, I would rather see these companies concentrate on

•  teaching strategies using document cameras;
• better professional development for visualizer use;
• visual teaching and learning approaches.

Doing these things well will create a welcome swell of new customers. Providing professional development services will usher in a fresh new revenue stream for a rapidly fossilizing hardware market. Concentrating on the instructional use, and not the hardware specs, of visualizers will create a freshness in the education market.

It’s always easy to follow the hardware breadcrumbs for revenue. But forsaking the heart of the matter—visual teaching and learning—is an immense mistake. That’s the core mission for these companies. Unfortunately, some of these firms are diluting their future potential by diversifying and moving away from their core.

Color Me Effective

(Turn on your speakers, cue the mystery music here by clicking on the widget's play button, and then read on below)

Recently I was touring a regional middle school (Preston Middle School, Poudre School District in Colorado) and had quite a nice surprise as I passed by an actively engaged math classroom. The teacher was using a document camera to review a math problem. But this teacher was doing something right. Something I don’t see often in classrooms using document cameras. Something we need to see more of. Something quite simple, yet quite effective. Something that works.

He was using Color on his document camera to clarify the concept, to make the solution process more attention getting, more understandable. Color has been used to help students master difficult concepts in math dating back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Why is it that some teachers use document cameras in the least effective fashion? In black and white? Start using Color with your document camera. Color works.

Call Me Crisp

In this series I am hoping to cover three trends that I really like in the world of document cameras. I like that...

• document cameras are getting smaller 
• doc cams are turning colorful
• high-definition is providing a crisp viewing experience

Most visualizers now on the market are coming with high-definition cameras. The improvement is stark. The quality of images used for learning is nothing less than remarkable. 

Perhaps this trend helps explain some statements that were offered up in my last two visualizer presentations:

"These images are much nicer than what I get using the document camera I currently have in my classroom."

"This visualizer is better than any I have seen. What kind is it?"

These comments and questions really bring home the difference between the current generation of high-definition doc cams and the older generation of equipment that first made its way into schools some years ago. 

Perhaps this story will help clarify: I was recently using my visualizer as the primary camera for a live web conference with a colleague. We were doing some synchronous live conference testing using both Google+ Hangouts and the conferencing system built into our Canvas learning management system at the university. The colleague immediately noted the difference and remarked: "This was the best, most high-def image I  have ever seen on a live session." And she remarked that latency and frame rate were not adversely affected. I explained that the high-def visualizer was the reason why.

By the way, be forewarned that you might already own a High-Def visualizer, but have the settings pushed to a lower resolution. For example, once I was demonstrating a new HD Recordex document camera in a teacher workshop, and I thought something was wrong with the image quality. Actually, I had mistakenly set this HD visualizer to a lower resolution level. I called the company, and they immediately helped me catch my mistake. I had set it to one of the lower of six available resolution settings. 

My bad...

Believe It or Not!

Aquarium. Oceanarium. Vivarium. Terrarium. Imagine all of these and more. Yes, I saw the first partially submersible document camera at ISTE. I guess I’ll just call it the water document camera. Not at all related to the water buffalo, it’s an intriguing tool developed by Ken-a-Vision for difficult-to-capture, yet powerfully immersive-submersive learning environments. I cannot find any mention of it on their website, but here is a short video showing what it looks like and how it works:

They also carry something called the Aqua Flex 1470, which is totally submersible. This is definitely science geek material.

Legend of the Donkey Cam

Improve your Donkey Cam Kung Fu by following this blog.

In the previous post, I suggested that one of the names given to classroom document cameras is that of "donkey cam." Where did that notion come from? I assure you, it came from the hearts of students. Here's the simple genesis of that phrase: 

In a brightly lit Colorado classroom,  a teacher moves from behind his desk to a small table holding his document camera. A student cheerfully cries out, “Are we using the ‘donkey cam’ today, Mr. Allen?"

I chose this story because students really appreciate the visual allure and conceptual clarity provided when document cameras are used well in instruction. Lovingly calling this modern audio-visual device a “donkey cam,” it is clear that this young lady was extremely pleased that the day’s lesson might be forthcoming using the visual approach that reaches her best as a 21st century visual learner. This blog is really about richly visual 21st Century teaching and learning--using a document camera.