Today’s topic is the lowly document camera. This is something that has been around for quite some time, and is often overlooked in a discussion of instructional technology. But the document camera is an amazing tool on so many levels! The most obvious, of course, is that it takes the blackboard off of the wall. Instead of a vertical writing surface with all its attendant challenges (can you write big enough? how long will your arm/shoulder take reaching up high in the air to write on the board, especially if you are "vertically challenged"? can you write a straight line across the blackboard, or does your writing gradually drift downwards? and hey, what about that chalk? I spent years getting chalk smears on my clothes, my hands, my arms, my nose (because chalk dust makes my nose itch). and speaking of chalk, how is your eraser technique?) we have moved to a horizontal writing surface, much more ergonomically friendly, not to mention no more chalk dust getting in your nose, on your clothes, in your delicate electronics. But it’s so much more than just that!
The first thing I learned about the document camera is that you must have the correct writing implement. My favorite is the ultra-fine Sharpie pen – it is dark enough to project well yet thin enough that I can draw complex chemical structures and not have the lines run over each other. I use the pens enough that I will literally wear out at least two of them in a given semester. I write on the blank side of used paper (a great reason to save all those flyers and things that show up in the mailbox). And, in contrast to the blackboard (once erased, it’s gone) – if I take a piece of paper off the document camera and start writing on a new one, and then a student has a question about something I wrote on the previous piece of paper, hey, I can just put it back on the camera and discuss it some more! And I can then take those same pieces of paper back to my office, run them through the automatic sheet feeder on my printer/scanner, save them as a PDF file, and post them to my Blackboard LMS website. My students absolutely love this. They still show up for class, but they don’t worry quite as much about copying down every little thing that I write.
Now here’s something that I learned this past summer. There were "technical difficulties" in Lipke Auditorium, where I usually teach, and the class was shifted first to Snowden Auditorium for a week (which was OK except that the document camera there is set too low, and I had to bend at an awkward angle to write) and then to the Media Auditorium in Healey Library. Now that second room was not good at all. It did have a document camera and the attendant technology – but the resolution on the camera/projector was AWFUL and the students had a terrible time reading what was being projected. When you can’t tell the difference between a 5 and an 8, that’s not good!
Document cameras would be great if they were nothing more than a horizontal blackboard – but there’s so much more you can do with them! If you have an interesting illustration that you’d like to share – sit it on the document camera and zoom in on it! Everyone can see it, and you can use a laser pointer to indicate which parts of it you want to talk about – or just point at the relevant bits right in the book, and your finger will be projected up there along with everything else! (Now, does this mean that you should be getting regular manicures and making sure your fingernails are clean and wearing "interesting" rings? Up to you!) I’ve discovered that teaching things like drawing Newman projections is simplified immensely by using the camera. I sit a molecular model right on the camera bed, and draw the Newman next to it on the paper. Everyone can see exactly what I’m doing. Amazing! I’ve done lots of molecular model demos using the document camera. Organic chemistry is a very visual subject, and it’s so easy to show the students exactly what it is they should be looking at this way!
In fact, I’ve even done chemical demonstrations on the document camera, in little Petri dishes. You can see color changes and precipitation reactions easily; you don’t bring large amounts of chemicals into the lecture hall; everyone in the room can see what you’re doing (as opposed to just the first three rows).
So, to summarize, the document camera is an incredibly powerful piece of instructional technology. If it is small enough to sit on the camera bed, it can be projected, and this will bring an amazing amount of flexibility to your teaching. Be creative – in fact, if you come up with any interesting ways to use the document camera, please comment here to share with the rest of us. Thanks!
