Author: Jason

As a new teacher, I did a lot of work at home. If that wasn’t painful enough, I can remember several days where I got to school and realized that the handout I spent too much time perfecting had been left at home on my printer.  Or, I had intentions of emailing documents to my school account or grabbing my flash drive, but being easily distracted, that often didn’t pan out.

After a few days of improvising lessons and trying to keep my students busy despite my unpreparedness, I quickly realized I needed a solution for this problem. And after trying out several strategies, here’s what I’ve found to be best:  Dropbox.

Dropbox is great! Basically, you can set it up on your home computer.  Choose a folder, and everything you save in that folder gets transferred to Dropbox’s servers.  So, it’s a great backup for when my computer inevitably crashes.  Install Dropbox on my school computer, and the folder with all my files is magically downloaded.  Make a change or add a file at school or home, and it replicates to the other location (unless my school district’s draconian filtering policies get in the way…).  As an added bonus, I can actually get to my files through any internet-connected computer by going to the Dropbox website.

Other benefits: I can share a folder to make it available to others.  When I get an email from a colleague asking for lesson ideas about stoichiometry, I can attach a few files from my Dropbox folder and contribute.  Likewise, when I get a great idea, lab, or lesson from a colleague, it goes in the appropriate folder within my Dropbox folder. Oh, and of course up to 2GB of storage is completely free!!! And, you can invite friends or do other simple tasks to earn more free space.

So, no more emailing files to myself. No more forgetting or losing my flash drive. My files are available to me virtually anywhere. I recommend this to my colleagues and students—I’ve had more than one instance where a student’s flash drive stopped working or got lost, and I always point them to Dropbox so it doesn’t happen again.

UPDATE September 4, 2011:

Our school network/IT department decided to block Dropbox, so I had to resort to my old-school methods for a while. However, when my laptop was stolen over the summer, having Dropbox was wonderful, as I lost almost none of my school work as it was all backed up on Dropbox’s servers.

UPDATE July 10, 2020:

It’s been a while, so let me catch you up: our district network policies went back and forth for a while as to whether Dropbox was blocked or allowed. By around 2013, it was blocked for good.

But, I had discovered Google Drive, which synced files between school and home the same way Dropbox did, providing a generous amount of storage with a free account.

Around 2015 or 2016, my district adopted Google Apps for Education, and I finally got an official school-sanctioned Google account (with unlimited storage!). Google Backup & Sync (or whatever they decided to call it now) has been my go-to for keeping files backed-up and synced between school and home.

With the cost of LCD projectors coming down, many more classrooms are being equipped with this technology.  However, document cameras remain quite expensive.  As I often need to project an enlargement of something on the screen, I decided to see if I could get similar functionality from cheap and readily available materials.

Since my projector is wired to my computer, I decided to go with a webcam as the video source.  I’ve seen many plans online for connecting camcorders and digital cameras to computers, and while they may provide a better quality and higher resolution image, a webcam serves the purposes of a document camera.  It’s definitely less bulky and the desktop microphone stand is great to hold up the tiny webcam.

The webcam (at least the one listed below) is plug-and-play with Windows.  Plug it in, open My Computer, click on USB Video Device, and it works out of the box.  No special software or drivers necessary.  The Genius webcam listed below offers 1280 x 720 resolution, though I believe that can only be achieved through the included software.  The most I’ve gotten Windows to do is 640 x 480.

The webcam is a manual focus by turning the lens, but if you set it to view a document once, it should be set for the most part.  I’ve seen the autofocus on a document camera do some weird things at times, so that may be for the best.  There is also no zoom on the webcam, so you have to adjust the mic stand to get different fields of view.  Also, the usb cord on the webcam was only about 5 feet long, so if you want to position it further from your computer, you’ll want to get a USB extension cable.  Note that if you want to use a USB hub with your webcam, you’ll need a powered one.

If you want a full-screen view of your webcam on the screen instead of the smaller view available through Windows Explorer, try FS Cam View.

Parts List:

Black 19 Inch Musician’s Gear Gooseneck Black 19 Inch $3.99

On-Stage Stands DS7100B Basic Fixed Height Desktop Stand $6.99

Musician’s Gear Clip-Type Mic Holder $1.95

Genius eFace 2025 2.0 M Effective Pixels USB 2.0 WebCam $24.99

Assembly is fairly straightforward.  Attach the gooseneck to the desktop stand and the clip-type mic holder to the gooseneck.  Clip the webcam onto the stand and use some cable ties or electrical tape to run the cord along the gooseneck out of the way.  Plug it in to an open USB port on your computer and Windows should recognize your webcam.

So there you have it.  A document camera for $37.92 plus a few bucks for shipping.  As a science teacher, I’ve used it to allow lab groups to share their experimental data and graphs with the class and to enlarge some chemistry lab safety demonstrations so the whole class can see them.  It’s worked pretty well so far.  Someone may find a better way to connect the webcam to the mic stand, but the clip-type mic holder works pretty well for me.

I’m also keeping my eyes peeled for some type of probably USB-powered lighting system that I can attach to the whole contraption, though the webcam does a decent job in medium light conditions.  Best of luck to those who build their own, and feel free to share your own ideas.

With all the testing, assemblies, and various schedules in a 5-12 public school, teachers invariably end up having to supervise a group of students they may not even teach for an hour or two without any real lesson plan. When that happens, I’ve discovered an activity that keeps the students engaged and requires no real planning on your part (unless you want to).

Jeopardy Labs

Jeopardy Labs provides a web-based jeopardy experience.  It works best if you have access to an interactive whiteboard and projector, but it could possibly work OK without them. All it takes is to go to the website, type in a topic (e.g. chemistry review), and it searches through hundreds of teacher-created jeopardy-style games.  Find one you like and get started.  It’s that easy.

It’s also super-easy to create your own jeopardy game.  It’s great because there’s no software to install–just use your web browser.  You can even use HTML to incorporate things like images, subscripts, bold, italics, etc.  Maybe someday Jeopardy Labs will incorporate a rich text editor onto their site to make those things easier.

I also just got access to an Education Insights Eggspert – like a buzzer system to tell who buzzed in first.  I’ll try using that this year for review activities–previously I’d let everyone respond on a personal whiteboard and maybe give double points to the team/individual who got the answer first.  But my students tend to get very competitive so it causes problems when two people respond at about the same time.  Anyway, I’ll try the Eggspert and let you know how it goes.