Out with the Old

In my 25 year career as a technology director, I loved opportunities that arose for trading in old technologies for new. I took advantage of this all the time, encouraging schools to do the same. So when I read about this offer recently, I jumped at the opportunity to share this with you. Now, I am willing to announce these trade-in (and any grant) opportunities for any vendor that contacts me, so manufacturers should never feel that I am playing favorites.  This is for educators: remember the September 30^th deadline!

Limited Time Trade-In Offer: $100 Instant Rebate

Solo 8 Trade-In Program from HoverCam Solo 8 price:             $349 Trade in Rebate*:   ($100)  Final Price:             $249** **Excludes taxes and shipping For a limited time, HoverCam will give your school a $100 instant rebate for each document camera you trade-in towards the purchase of a HoverCam Solo 8. To be eligible for the instant rebate, just take your obsolete document camera - regardless of brand - recycle it responsibly, get a receipt listing your unit and send it to HoverCam along with a photo as proof of recycle. Trade-In offer expires September 30th with a maximum of 10 units per school district. To place an order, just contact your preferred HoverCam authorized reseller or HoverCam directly.

A Teacher's Story (2)

Continuing from our last post,  this supernal 3rd grade teacher asks students to measure their own feet using a ruler, measuring with inches. She models how we to trace around the foot and estimate first; then measure the tracing and round up to the closest inch by using the document camera to model so that everyone can see clearly. Then, she asks students to work in pairs to complete this measurement. Once they have measured their feet, they cut them out and arrange them from smallest to largest on the floor.

After examining the vertical bar graph that the students have created on the floor, students create their own bar graph using the data of the measurements. Again, the teacher models bar graph construction for them under the doc cam. After completing the graphs, she has a few students come up to show their finished work under the document camera. Quickly and quietly, she captures their work by scanning it. Her plan is to upload these digital exemplars to the class website so they can show their parents what they did and how they learned it.  

Finally, the teacher displays an exit ticket under the doc cam for them to complete, as the lesson comes to its end, and before the students move out to lunch break.  (An exit ticket is a short task they must complete, often a formative assessment or reflection, before they can exit the room.)

Wow, fourteen creative ways to employ the document camera in a single math lesson! Can you imagine that? This is what visual learning and teaching are all about. And this is why classroom document cameras are deeply relevant in classrooms today.

A Teacher's Story (1)

I recently sampled a group of teachers enrolled in my graduate programs at the University of Colorado-Denver, soliciting some of their best-ever ideas for teaching with document cameras. Here is a two-part postings showing how one Colorado teacher used the classroom visualizer in fourteen different ways in a single lesson. The italics are mine.

Part 1. Imagine for a moment a math lesson on measurement. Jen Miller, a magnificent third grade teacher working in a Colorado elementary school, reads aloud the book, “How Big is a Foot”, showing the students the pictures under the document camera to ensure that all students can see the illustrations. As she reads, she quickly “captures” a few of the book illustrations to use the following day when reviewing the lesson, before moving forward to cover new content.

After reading, she shows the students the size of the King’s foot (12 inches) by displaying the ruler under the document camera. She continues to display other different measurement tools (string, protractor, etc.) under the display, for the students to see, relating them back to the book as she goes.

Next, she suggests to the students a few different examples of items in the room to measure and ask them to write down which measuring tool would make the most sense to use. She asks several students to come up to show their answers under the document camera. She places a graphic organizer under the doc cam for the final question, asking the students to come up and put their initials in the box of the correct tool to use. She then shows the class results under the doc cam for the entire class to see.

To find out what happens next in Ms. Miller's creative classroom, return for our next post, in two weeks.

New Wireless Visualizer

A new wireless document camera entry is now launching full speed in the education market. It is manufactured by Ken-A-Vision.  It’s the 7880c Wireless Wifi Enabled Document Camera. 

The set up appears to be quite easy: you hit the power button, and when the network light comes on, tablets computers and smartphones simply connect to the wifi.  Then you open the EduCam app, and add a session key to find the camera.  The teacher is quickly broadcasting to classroom sets of devices. 

BTW here are the specs on this new wireless visualizer; you can also see this visualizer for yourself in Atlanta at the ISTE conference this month (in the Camcor booth). 

Doc Cams and Assessment

In the examples below, teachers in Colorado elementary schools show how to use the document camera in assessment. The italics are my attempt to highlight some very thoughtful and creative uses of the classroom visualizer.

• Effective assessment requires that results and progress are effectively communicated to stakeholders. So, a third grade teacher takes snapshots of student measurements (a math activity) and posts them to the web so parents can see the progress of their own children in measurement skills.

• A teacher laments: “In fourth grade, my students don’t get to type as many papers as I
  
  would like them to.  The majority of published work is handwritten due to technology constraints.”  One solution this teacher has developed is to quickly and efficiently capture written desk work in PDF format with the doc cam's snapshot feature, and then, using Adobe Reader’s annotation features, annotates each student paper with individualized feedback. “I email the commented papers back to them so they can review their comments and use some of my suggestions to improve their writing,” he explains. “It’s like running 28 conferences simultaneously,” remarks the teacher. “It also makes me more efficient; I am much quicker at making digital comments than handwritten written ones. This allows me more time to plan quality instruction. ”

• A middle school math teacher records audio feedback on the the doc cam (with its camera and built in microphone) as she grades assignments, providing individualized feedback for each student on her/his work. We call this approach ‘doc-casting.’ She finds it is particularly helpful for students still learning English.

• A fourth grade teacher assigns a math problem to the class and then observes how students go about solving the problem. He then chooses a few students, each using a different approach, and has them share their thinking with the class as a whole using the doc cam in a live setting. The entire class then discusses the demonstrated approaches. Each approach is also recorded in case students need to review them at home or later in the week. “This is also powerful to show parents at conferences,” adds the teacher.

Telling Time

Despite recent anxiety about new online assessments, there is certainly no shortage of creativity coming from teachers these days. I recently sampled a group of teachers enrolled in my graduate programs at the University of Colorado-Denver, soliciting some of their best-ever ideas for teaching with document cameras. Here is the first of three postings showing some of the creative ways teachers are using their visualizers in today’s challenging classrooms.

In the case study below, a magnificent third grade teacher working in a Colorado elementary school shows how to use the document camera in a creative fashion. The italics are my attempt to highlight some very thoughtful and creative uses of the classroom visualizer.

One teacher asks her kids to draw a picture of two clocks while sitting at their desks. Working in pairs, they draw one clock with the time 3:50 p.m. and the other showing the hand positions 90 minutes later. The students are then asked to come up and explain their thinking as they view their pictures, which are displayed on the visualizer. This, of course, provides immediate feedback as the students present their work, but the feedback helps the entire class. 

New @ HoverCam

There are a lot of new things happening in the world of document cameras and visualization tools, as evidenced in the first two major conferences of 2014 (FETC and TCEA).  In this post, I will highlight three of the ground-breaking trends being ushered in by Hovercam, while recently exhibiting at TCEA and FETC.

GuruBook 5 Android tablet and document camera

In a ground-breaking move, Hovercam (Pathway Innovations) has released the first combined tablet/document camera solution for schools and training professionals. You have to see the GuruBook 5 ($599) to believe it:

Here are the specs on this remarkable new device.

Improved Pixel Quality

HoverCam has been quietly showing their new HoverCam Solo 8 ($599) at their booth. No reason to keep this a secret! The Solo 8 offers 8 megapixel, ultra HD camera display running on an efficient USB 3.0 backbone. You can reference even more delightful advantages by accessing their infosheet here.

Wireless Freedom

HoverCam continues to make strides in providing the freedom of wireless connectivity to educators and trainers. Recently they released their wireless AirStation I solution ($159), designed to bring the flexibility of wireless imaging to their Solo 5 document camera. See this reference sheet.

And of course, the above-mentioned GuruBook 5 is the ultimate in wireless imaging.

Here's the big message emerging from my last three posts: Technical leaders who think document cameras are "old technology" are seriously mistaken. Take another look.

New @ Recordex

There are a lot of new things happening in the world of document cameras and visualization tools, as evidenced in the first two major conferences of 2014 (FETC and TCEA).  In this post, I will highlight some of the ground-breaking trends being offered by the Recordex document camera company, who recently exhibited at TCEA and FETC.

Great educational technology always reduces steps, simplifies the work in front of us. Recordex has done this by implementing one-click integration of recorded videos (I call these ‘doc-casts’) using Screencast-O-Matic. This step simplifies the sharing of doc-casts with students, and is especially useful when sharing assessment recordings.

Also, Recordex upped their game by adding a seamless microscope adapter to their already excellent offering. This will certainly draw the attention of science educators.

A small adapter enables the Recordex to capture microscope images.

An example of the HD display available from microscope viewing.

What's New in 2014

There are a lot of new things happening in the world of document cameras and visualization tools, as evidenced in the first two major conferences of 2014 (FETC and TCEA).  Here are some quick news bytes:

AverInformation

AverInfo featured a redesign of the user interface of the software that controls their document cameras, pictured below. 

It's a good move, based on my previous post, entitled “Improve This!”

ExoLabs

This is the first time I have seen ExoLabs at one of these conferences, and they made a splash with their new microscope camera and their close up camera with a mounting stand, pictured below.

GradeCam

GradeCam made a first time entry with an assessment scoring all-in-one solution, pictured below. Not a document camera, they claim, but it looks like one to me. Perhaps we can call it a single-purpose document camera?

Fujitsu

Fujitsu also entered these exhibit halls for the first time with a dedicated scanning solution, designed to bring high quality to image capture, while replacing the long-asleep flatbed scanner. This generation of hardware is called their "scansnap" line. But I am bit worried--what they were modeling might indeed be illegal.

Lumens

Standard Lumens visualizers were on display in a typically attractive booth. “Pass-through HDMI inputs” were the newest feature they were promoting. Lumens would do better to return to teacher-centered messaging. See my blog post entitled “Visualize Better Messaging.”

In the next two posts, we will highlight some of the ground-breaking trends being offered two of the document camera companies exhibiting at TCEA and FETC.

Tech Eye for the Chalk Guy

Many educators among us are less technical, but greatly caring and effective in their work. This post is dedicated to you.

The classroom document camera is one of the best tools ever for improving classroom instruction. It’s really all about visual teaching and learning. And we know the current generation is really tuned into all things visual. Because the document camera is so easy to master, so uncomplicated to use, it is worth your time to learn how to use it well.

Here are some useful, well-travelled quotations that may provide a spark—that may move you to action—helping you to realize importance of brain-based visual teaching and learning, using visualizers:

“It is better to see something once than to hear it a hundred times.”

Chinese proverb

"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time."

Chinese proverb

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

Unknown

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

Da Vinci

Editor's Choice

At the start of every new year, I thoughtfully highlight a single post from the previous year here on FutureTalk VIZ that embodies the spirit of this blog. This post carries the kind of message that I would hope readers would want to take time to carefully re-read and mull over. The post I recommend for Editor’s Choice  this year is THREE THINGS...

2013 VIZ Word Cloud

Here’s a graphic word cloud of all the key words or themes in our Future-Talk VIZ blog during the year 2013.  The more the word is found, the larger it appears in this word cloud. The word cloud is interactive, so explore a bit!

It’s quite interesting to visualize, in this way, the recurring themes and concepts that have emerged from Future-Talk VIZ this last year. It’s like putting your fingers on the pulse of what’s happening with visual educational strategies—and taking a read.

VIZ Worldview 2013

The Future-Talk VIZ blog serves a diverse international audience. Our readers might be interested in seeing which countries were our top ten blog visitors during 2013. Based on web impressions for the 2013 calendar year, here is how the data shape up:

United States

Russia

Germany

China

Ukraine

France

Poland

UK

Are there any surprises here? Or are these just “the usual suspects?” What do you think? Please comment.

Of course, this chart only represents the top ten. Many hundreds of other visitors have frequented this blog from countries all over the world. I want to thank you for your deep and committed interest in visual learning and teaching. Please write me, let me know what you are doing in your country. I would love to feature some interviews in 2014.

Best of VIZ 2013

Last year was a thriving year for the Future-Talk VIZ blog. As the new year begins, it is fitting to reflect on the most popular topical posts of 2013.  The top nine topical posts of 2013 are presented below, in order of web impressions received:

Digital Shapeshifter
iPads as Doc Cams
The Death of the Doc Cam
Grants, Contests, and More
High-leverage Strategies
VIZ Micro-Worlds
A Bird's Eye View
Simplicity
Doc Cams in Online Teaching

Actually, it’s quite thought provoking to speculate as to why these particular topics were “top of mind” in 2013 for the diverse international audience that regularly follows this blog. My book continues to pull positive interest; the explosive growth of iPads in schools explains the next two priorities, which are worth re-reading; our Great Recession explains the rise of our fourth-ranked posting; keen interest in Marzano’s instructional strategies, as applied to doc cams, explains the interest in “high-leverage strategies”; and the rising tide of online learning explains the last entry. Please let us know your hypotheses or thinking by posting a short comment.

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!

Say It Simply

In a past post, Visualize Better Messaging, I warned about the kind of technical messaging coming from document camera manufacturers that will never reach into the hearts and minds of educational customers.  “Say it simply,” I argued.  I finally ran into an advertisement/promotional, (coming from Ken-a-Vision) that did messaging right (or at least without technical overkill). Look at their simple, core message, quoted below:

I'm the FlexCam 2, but my friends call me Kenny.  I help schools, like yours, unlock their teachers' existing curriculum on all their digital devices at once. I love helping teachers share their existing curriculum digitally with every student in their classroom…

You can get me set up and connect in minutes, and I work well at any grade level or class subject . Together, we can make the transition to a paperless, digital classroom easier and faster. If you want to make your tablets and laptops more than just digital textbooks, contact my friends at Ken-A-Vision. I know they'll be happy to tell you more about me…

What a great example of marketing to real customers!

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.

Doc Cams in Online Teaching

I periodically conduct a short workshop featuring techniques and resources for using document cameras in support of online teaching. Here are some of the main advantages I like to discuss in these workshops:

Techniques

• Picture-in-picture synchronous teaching
• Doc-Casting
• Personalized assessment: voice and color-annotated feedback
• Scanning (e.g., PDF preparation)
• Digital stills
• Live demonstration toolset: presentation and annotation

Strategies

• Aiming at the Abstract: Visualization
• Use / Re-use (make it once, use it many times)
• Time-saving (efficiency)

Document cameras can do so much in support of online teaching—so much so that these devices should become a required part of the online instructor’s basic equipment toolkit. 

Visualize Better Messaging

At conferences, document camera companies often do a nice job with their exhibit hall booths, offering friendly and welcoming spaces for educators passing by. With their print messaging, not so much.

Here is the experiment I undertook: I procured the literature from each manufacturer’s table, reading each one through. The ‘featured’ sales messages were enough to scare an educator right back into their classrooms. Here’s a sampling of the offending core messaging I found in my pouch:

“[It’s] a great pass-through camera…”

“HDMI Input & Output – ideal for integration…”

“Perfect for retrofitting any room.”

“VGA/USB Dual-Mode”

And, of course, my favorite:

“[Now] UVC (USB video class compliant) with the latest CMOS 3.4 sensor…”

Whatever that means. These manufacturers need to understand that this style of “technical messaging” is gibberish to K-12 folks. Say it in English. Say it simply. Or talk about effective visual teaching. Come on—I know you folks—what’s with this? It looks like the technical department certainly beat the marketing heads on this one. Most of this seems written in the cryptic lexicon of university buyers or RFP junkies. Are you trying to sell to educational customers, or just advertising to outshine your competition? This type of technical messaging will never reach into the hearts and minds of educational customers. 

This message is tough love in nature, but you know I love you. Don’t you?