Glen Gilchrist•Make your own visualiser

Make your own visualiser – change the way you teach

January 15th, 2011 | Posted by Glen Gilchrist | 12 Comments

TeckNet® C016 USB HD Webcam, 5 MegaPixel, 5G Lens, USB Microphone & 6 LED (Electronics)

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Edit: May 2012

This article still gets picked up by people searching for a guide to make their own visualisers from USB web cams – the Logitech camera I used is sadly not available any more. A similar shaped and reasonably priced camera is linked above.

I’ve never written a blog piece “on demand” so to speak , but Danny Nicholson peaked my interest. Over at The White Board Blog Danny calls for a “ UK Education Tech Blog Carnival” – a group of bloggers create entries on a theme (in this case technology) and post him the links. He then blogs all the links and hence creates the “carnival”.

What is a visualiser?
The basic answer is a computerised OHP / flexible web cam / microscope viewer. A good overview here.

But in a nutshell a visualiser allows you to project and/or capture stills/video from your teaching area onto your whiteboard / IWB via a data projector.

About June 2010 I was lucky enough to be given a visualiser – a Promethian one, just like the picture to evaluate for the school. After some faffing about (as we have Windows 7 throughout), the drivers installed and I was “good to go”.

Immediately I was smitten.
As a Science teacher, the ability to project a demo from your front bench, to the whole class, who remain seated, is priceless. Preparing slides, cutting blocks of sodium and wiring 3-pin plugs are just some of the “big screen” demos that I’ve enjoyed recently. Showing student created cheek cell slides is far more motivational than peering down a badly focused microscope.

But, being able to record your demos is even better. Instant plenary material or when you have to re-explain for the fifth time, how to prepare an onion cell, you can just replay the original demo. Priceless.

I’ve time lapsed seedlings growing and made stop-motion animation showing ionic / covalent bonding. Again superb – especially when up loaded to YouTube.

…but wait, they cost £350+ would I actually buy one?
The model we have costs circa £350, but the prices rise to over £1,000 for a high resolution visualisers. Are they worth it?

In my humble opinion – No, and I’ll show you why.

You can make your own, that will do 80% of the functionality of a commercial one (being realistic, 100% of the functionality that you will actually use) for about £40.

You’ll need:

USB Web Cam
Flexible neck desk lamp (cheaper the better as you’ll be re-purposing it)
Software (the excellent MyScreenCam is perfect and free)
Basic tools (Dremmel / hand drill, screw drivers)

1) Tear down the lamp

i) Remove the inside of the lamp shade
ii) Remove any electrical wires
iii) Unscrew the lamp shade from the flexible neck

2) Tear down the web cam

i) Remove any leg / stand from the camera body.
What we are aiming for is just the camera.

Modify the lamp shade

We are aiming to insert the web cam into the shade, so we need a hole in the shade big enough to take the USB connector and the ferrite core.

Enlarge the central core with whatever tools you have to hand. A drill bit / dremmel would be best.

Thread the USB cable through the shade, remembering that the camera wants to site inside the shade.

Reattach the shade to the flexi neck.

(In my case, the web cam fitted so snugly that I did not glue it in there – you may need to attach the camera with some hot glue)

Plug in the USB cable and fire up the software.

The result

Using the MyScreenCam software, you can project full screen whatever the camera is pointed at. It can capture stills or video the demo for you.

Using Flix (or other) time lapse software, you can create time-lapse movies

Using the excellent (and free) MonkeyJam you can create stop-motion animation.

What it wont do?

I haven’t found any software that will do “split screening” and as the web cam as a limit of 5cm for macro focus, it wont attach to a microscope.

But it also wont cost £350.

So, go on, for £40 build a visualiser and change the way you teach.

Update: 02/02/11

I submitted this to the blog carnival: The Inaugural Ed Tech Blog

Posted in : Technology
Tags: ukedchat

8 Comments to “Make your own visualiser – change the way you teach”

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Danny Nicholson says:

January 15, 2011 at 6:41 pm

Cheers Glen. Great post and a lovely idea. I’ll include this in the carnival thanks for the submission!

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Glen says:

January 15, 2011 at 6:48 pm

Thanks Danny — I use my “home made” one at least once per day, to the point where the students are asking me to.

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Karen Newby Jones says:

January 15, 2011 at 7:32 pm

Glen, thank you for your recent series of blog posts. They are practical and helpful and it’s great to see sharing of ideas and honest evaluations of practices. I’ll be pointing colleagues in the direction of this blog and encouraging them to do the same.
Thanks again, Karen

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Steve Dickie says:

January 23, 2011 at 9:12 pm

Most of the web cams I’ve taken apart have adjustable lenses. They are usually set to work well for someone sitting in front of them, but you may be able to screw it in/out to ajdust you image distance. I guess what I’m trying to say is you might be able to attach it to your microscope.

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- Glen says:
  
  January 23, 2011 at 9:51 pm
  
  Ouch – never thought of that. Popped open the Quick Cam and it does indeed have a threaded focus lens over the sensor. Will fiddle and report back.
  
  Cheers
  G
  
  Reply
Gemma Young says:

January 26, 2011 at 9:06 pm

Agree that these are very useful teaching tools. I found mine invaluable for showing classes the paper-based mark scheme so they could mark their own mock exams. It meant we could mark our papers as a class and I could talk through each question whilst everyone was on the same page.
Also good for showing gory dissections in close-up detail!

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- Glen says:
  
  January 26, 2011 at 9:46 pm
  
  I never thought I’d use mine (commerical or home made) as much as I do. It gets fired up daily, is used to grab still and video images and my Year 8 have begun to create a stop-motion animation with it.
  
  Normally things like this get a “wow” factor and then go back into the cupboard. This, however, is out and used all the time.
  
  G
  
  Reply
Mary says:

February 25, 2012 at 12:17 am

Thanks a million for this idea. I always had it on the edge of my mind that it should be so simple, but the addition of the lamp makes it even better!

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