A few weeks ago (10 September 2013) I attended one of our regular SALT (Shared Approaches to Teaching and Learning) sessions on "Enriching the student experience in and outside the classroom" - link here for UWE users only.
My colleague Basil Norbury gave an entertaining presentation on using gapped worksheets and recording what he was doing via the visualiser.
A visualiser, in case you don't know, is a document camera connected to the lectern PC. It allows you to project a document onto the classroom scren. It accomodates documents up to a little larger than A4 size (in either dimension) but you can zoom in on anything smaller. In some larger classrooms with dual screens you can project the PC image onto one screen and the visualiser image onto the other.
Basil's demonstration encouraged me to experiment a bit more with the visualiser. This week I was teaching Technical Writing and Editing in a single-screen room, so I could only show one image at a time. The task in hand was to edit (by hand) a passage of writing in one of my paper handouts, while compiling a "document style sheet" on a grid showing decisions I had taken, e.g. "spell numbers one to nine", so that I could maintain consistency through the document.
So I was working on two documents - the passage of writing and the style sheet grid. I put the text on paper under the visualiser and projected it on the screen, and drew the style sheet grid on the whiteboard. Then as I amended the text passage by hand in black ink, I wrote the corresponding stylistic decisions up on the whiteboard grid.
I often like to "mix and match", working interactively with the students, but usually I've drawn something on the whiteboard while something else is being projected as a Powerpoint slide. Editing and compiling two documents live simultaneously was a new departure for me, and it seemed to work very well. I may well do it again.
Recently I have also used the visualiser to project small solid objects, such as book covers or selected pages. On one occasion the network PC failed me completely but I still had access to the visualiser, and I projected a paper copy of my Powerpoint slides that I happened to have with me.
Another "solid object" is a dice - I always carry dice with various numbers of sides in case I want to make a random selection, e.g. the next student team to present. As a novelty, to show that the presentation order was truly random, I've rolled dice under the visualiser so that students can see the results.
Conclusions
Visual display technology has of course been around for ages. When I started teaching the most common aid was an overhead projector or OHP. That only projected translucent foils, printed or hand-drawn. Nevertheless you could do quite sophisticated things with it to build up diagrams by using multiple foils on top of each other.
There was also a less common device called an epidiascope, which would illuminate and project a solid object (dimly!). Epidiascopes have been around since the late 1800s and were the precursor of both the overhead projector and the document camera / visualiser.
More "conventional" display technology included film and slide projectors, VHS players and so forth. I also recall a special device that converted computer presentations into 35 mm slides using a type of instant film.
My early teaching days, running training sessions in industry, involved carting around a "portable" PC (well, luggable - it was the size of a small suitcase). I also carried a "slate", an A5-sized translucent LCD black and white display that sat on top of an overhead projector and connected to the PC. I used to switch between foils and the live image of the computer system that I was running training about.
When I came to UWE, decent PC-driven projectors were available in the larger classroom, with OHPs in the smaller rooms, I was glad when large screen projectors became the norm because it allowed much more flexibility in preparing materials, and a much richer range of presentation materials, incorporating video and audio.
Visualisers started in the larger rooms but have now become more widespread. But handwritten diagrams etc, built up "live" during dialogue with the students, have always been part of my classroom practice, and I can't see that going away any time soon. Visualisers are just another tool in my toolkit to provide a visual dimension to complement live interaction with the students.
My colleague Basil Norbury gave an entertaining presentation on using gapped worksheets and recording what he was doing via the visualiser.
A visualiser, in case you don't know, is a document camera connected to the lectern PC. It allows you to project a document onto the classroom scren. It accomodates documents up to a little larger than A4 size (in either dimension) but you can zoom in on anything smaller. In some larger classrooms with dual screens you can project the PC image onto one screen and the visualiser image onto the other.
Basil's demonstration encouraged me to experiment a bit more with the visualiser. This week I was teaching Technical Writing and Editing in a single-screen room, so I could only show one image at a time. The task in hand was to edit (by hand) a passage of writing in one of my paper handouts, while compiling a "document style sheet" on a grid showing decisions I had taken, e.g. "spell numbers one to nine", so that I could maintain consistency through the document.
So I was working on two documents - the passage of writing and the style sheet grid. I put the text on paper under the visualiser and projected it on the screen, and drew the style sheet grid on the whiteboard. Then as I amended the text passage by hand in black ink, I wrote the corresponding stylistic decisions up on the whiteboard grid.
I often like to "mix and match", working interactively with the students, but usually I've drawn something on the whiteboard while something else is being projected as a Powerpoint slide. Editing and compiling two documents live simultaneously was a new departure for me, and it seemed to work very well. I may well do it again.
Recently I have also used the visualiser to project small solid objects, such as book covers or selected pages. On one occasion the network PC failed me completely but I still had access to the visualiser, and I projected a paper copy of my Powerpoint slides that I happened to have with me.
Another "solid object" is a dice - I always carry dice with various numbers of sides in case I want to make a random selection, e.g. the next student team to present. As a novelty, to show that the presentation order was truly random, I've rolled dice under the visualiser so that students can see the results.
Conclusions
- I think I'll seek imaginative ways to use the visualiser in some of my future lessons, e.g. drawing diagrams - will this be better than using the whiteboard for some situations? It could get round the problem of taking photos from the reflective glass whiteboard, as mentioned in my earlier post "Capturing the Moment"
- I'll experiment with recording video (and voice) from the visualiser onto a memory stick.
- I'll try taking still photos of documents using the visualiser and compare them with my camera photos (bearing in mind that I would usually have only a couple of minutes to do this at the end of the lesson)
Visual display technology has of course been around for ages. When I started teaching the most common aid was an overhead projector or OHP. That only projected translucent foils, printed or hand-drawn. Nevertheless you could do quite sophisticated things with it to build up diagrams by using multiple foils on top of each other.
There was also a less common device called an epidiascope, which would illuminate and project a solid object (dimly!). Epidiascopes have been around since the late 1800s and were the precursor of both the overhead projector and the document camera / visualiser.
More "conventional" display technology included film and slide projectors, VHS players and so forth. I also recall a special device that converted computer presentations into 35 mm slides using a type of instant film.
My early teaching days, running training sessions in industry, involved carting around a "portable" PC (well, luggable - it was the size of a small suitcase). I also carried a "slate", an A5-sized translucent LCD black and white display that sat on top of an overhead projector and connected to the PC. I used to switch between foils and the live image of the computer system that I was running training about.
When I came to UWE, decent PC-driven projectors were available in the larger classroom, with OHPs in the smaller rooms, I was glad when large screen projectors became the norm because it allowed much more flexibility in preparing materials, and a much richer range of presentation materials, incorporating video and audio.
Visualisers started in the larger rooms but have now become more widespread. But handwritten diagrams etc, built up "live" during dialogue with the students, have always been part of my classroom practice, and I can't see that going away any time soon. Visualisers are just another tool in my toolkit to provide a visual dimension to complement live interaction with the students.
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