Capturing the moment

A common feature of my classroom practice is that I capture things that happen in the classroom - I almost always carry a digital camera and a voice recorder. Broadly, my objectives (not in any order of priority) are:

• To facilitate students reviewing their experiential learning within the classroom
• To allow students to compare the work of other groups with their own
• To capture content-heavy "guest lectures" for students to analyse later
• To produce a record to help develop future sessions
• To capture materials for disabled students who would otherwise be disadvantaged in the particular classroom situation

I haven't particularly used the captured "artefacts" as an assessment mechanism, but that might be a future possibility.

So what do I actually do?

• Sound recordings of guest lectures (disabled students sometimes do this themselves and share the recordings with me)
• Photos of whiteboard diagrams developed during discussions or analyses, drawn by myself or by students
• Photos of flip charts (ditto)

The new reflective whiteboards are easier to clean but they are very reflective, which makes photographing them very difficult. It is possible to manipulate the image to clean it up (Paint.net is a versatile free Windows photo editor), but sometimes the images are just about legible but not good enough quality to post.

In this case I rapidly redraw the diagrams on a white sketch pad - it doesn't take long - and photograph or scan the result.

Other things I might try?

• Photographing from the visualiser (the proper name for the computer epidiascope) - Using this for video capture too, as explained in Summer School or in SALT session.
• Polarising filter to cut out reflections from glass whiteboards - will depend on the coating material on the glass, and on how well the filter deals with reflections from multiple light sources.

An unedited photo of a diagram drawn during a tutorial discussion. 

This is on one of the "old" whiteboards - messy but few reflections.