I’m a 32 year old teacher and I want an overhead projector.
A dry erase transparency is much easier to write on than the white board. My macro handwriting is awful, students can barely read what I write on the board. So I always end up writing on a peice of paper on my desk, and I have my phone on a tripod so I can get a “top down shot” of me writing on the paper, then I screen cast that to the smart board.
It works, I can write legibly by writing in a normal size, and then enlarge it for the class to read fairly quickly… Once all the cameras and casting is set up.
But it would be so much easier to just have an overhead projector, a few transparencies and a dry erase marker. Roll it out, plug it in, aim and focus the lens, then I’m done. Plus then if the internet goes out I could still use the board!
I bet it would be every bit as good as you think. I had a math teacher back in middle school ~30 years ago who taught EVERY lesson by talking as he wrote things on a transparency on the overhead projector.
We have great tech for that stuff now, but the projector and markers feels very human-compatible in an analog way. Kind of like reading a book I guess.
I still find it funny how some technological ‘upgrades’ just don’t do things as well as older tech. In university I had a touch screen laptop with a pen - the finger touch wasn’t as good as now (pressure I think, rather than capacitative, and none of the fancy tricks like two finger) but the pen just worked great for me for writing. When touch screens became fashion for laptops for a while that sounded great… but they couldn’t at all do the job I lost in my stylus-input Toshiba. And, as a Toshiba, it was decent generally as a not too expensive laptop.
I was lucky that about the time I got it, Linux support was coming out for Wacom tablets. (Which is what was integrated in the screen, I guess.) Incidentally, Xournal turned out way better than any of the programs I had on Windows for writing/drawing and for annotating PDFs. Including Microsoft Office’s “One-somethingorother” (I forget the name now.) The Office one was so unexpectedly clunky, and also less powerful. Ah, shame I don’t have much use for Xournal these days with no pen input screen. …Oh, except every time I have to fill in a pdf form, if it’s not set up or not set up right. Xournal is more clunky for that task than I’d hope from a pdf annotator, but it just works when other things don’t.
I’m a 32 year old teacher and I want an overhead projector.
A dry erase transparency is much easier to write on than the white board. My macro handwriting is awful, students can barely read what I write on the board. So I always end up writing on a peice of paper on my desk, and I have my phone on a tripod so I can get a “top down shot” of me writing on the paper, then I screen cast that to the smart board.
It works, I can write legibly by writing in a normal size, and then enlarge it for the class to read fairly quickly… Once all the cameras and casting is set up.
But it would be so much easier to just have an overhead projector, a few transparencies and a dry erase marker. Roll it out, plug it in, aim and focus the lens, then I’m done. Plus then if the internet goes out I could still use the board!
I bet it would be every bit as good as you think. I had a math teacher back in middle school ~30 years ago who taught EVERY lesson by talking as he wrote things on a transparency on the overhead projector.
We have great tech for that stuff now, but the projector and markers feels very human-compatible in an analog way. Kind of like reading a book I guess.
I still find it funny how some technological ‘upgrades’ just don’t do things as well as older tech. In university I had a touch screen laptop with a pen - the finger touch wasn’t as good as now (pressure I think, rather than capacitative, and none of the fancy tricks like two finger) but the pen just worked great for me for writing. When touch screens became fashion for laptops for a while that sounded great… but they couldn’t at all do the job I lost in my stylus-input Toshiba. And, as a Toshiba, it was decent generally as a not too expensive laptop.
I was lucky that about the time I got it, Linux support was coming out for Wacom tablets. (Which is what was integrated in the screen, I guess.) Incidentally, Xournal turned out way better than any of the programs I had on Windows for writing/drawing and for annotating PDFs. Including Microsoft Office’s “One-somethingorother” (I forget the name now.) The Office one was so unexpectedly clunky, and also less powerful. Ah, shame I don’t have much use for Xournal these days with no pen input screen. …Oh, except every time I have to fill in a pdf form, if it’s not set up or not set up right. Xournal is more clunky for that task than I’d hope from a pdf annotator, but it just works when other things don’t.
… Sorry, nostalgic rant over.