Top 5 Uses for SMART Document Camera in the Elementary Classroom

As technology evolves, so does it's use in education.  Not meant to be a band-aid solution for classroom issues, the various pieces of technology should be used as tools to enhance and support the classroom experience.  The beauty of this is that these tools are as limited or limitless as the imagination of the teacher.

One valuable piece of technology is the document camera.  I've featured the SMART doc cam simply due to the fact that it integrates seamlessly with SMART Notebook -- one click of the button on the toolbar, and voila! Your image is displayed directly on the SMART Board and can be saved into a Notebook page.

                                                                                                              

I've seen numerous great examples of using document cameras, and had even more suggestions provided to me by my PLN on Twitter.  For the purpose of this discussion, I thought I'd share the top 5 examples that I feel would enhance learning in the elementary classroom.

In no particular order, here they are:

1.Capture images of eggs hatching, plants growing, etc. -- some document cameras have a "timed capture" option, so the class can see the progression every hour, every day, etc. Of course, you can manually capture images as an experiment progesses -- at the start of every Science class, for example.

2. Model an abstract concept that students have a hard time visualizing.  For example, zoom in close during a discussion of the surface tension of water

3.  Reading a story together as a class? What better way to have Kindergarten or Grade 1 students follow along and read aloud as a large group -- because document cameras capture real-time movement, the teacher can point to each word as it's read.  The colourful pictures can also become a jumping-off point for discussion.  Don't forget to save an image of the students' favourite page to refer to during a later activity!

4. Capture an image of a student's handwritten rough draft.  Quicker and simpler than hooking up a scanner, and using some fun tools within SMART Notebook, manipulating the information has never been easier!

5. Enlarge an activity that you'd like to model prior to students working independently.  Because the document camera is so easy to manipulate and contains options such as zoom, auto focus and freeze, it becomes an extremely flexible "microscope".  The sky is the limit -- investigate the parts of a flower, model how to count coins, examine that lady bug that someone brought in from recess -- the possibilities are truly endless.