A Do-it-Yourself Document Camera, Spyware, and Firefox
Royal Van Horn · Phi Delta Kappan · 2005
ONE OF THE classrooms I regularly teach has a document camera or an as they are often called. Teachers my graduate classes often say how much they would like to have a document camera their classrooms. Since such a camera typically costs about $800, it is unlikely that many teachers will have their wish come true. However, there is a simple solution: just make your own. A document camera is nothing more than a camera mounted on a special stand, often with lights mounted on the side. My experience with document cameras leads me to believe that most of them feature very cheap cameras. That's why they need such good lights: the cameras are not made to work low-light situations like most higher-quality cameras. Thus all you really need to make your own document camera is a stand and a camera. Of course, you also need a television to display the output. Most photographic studios, whether amateur or professional, have copy stands. Photographers mount a camera on a copy stand to take pictures of something placed on the stand's baseboard, such as an antique portrait or a small object. Doing a quick search of the Internet, I found a workable copy stand without lights for $52.50 (www.adorama.com/CECS1.html). Since I happened to have an old copy stand storage, I decided to use it instead of a new one for my research on this column. Once you have obtained a copy stand, the second task you face creating your own Elmo is to find a camera that can be mounted on it. If you have a digital still camera and the video out cable that came with it, you can use that. Incidentally, the video out wire usually has a yellow end. You will probably also need to get a long extension cable with a male and female RCA jack on it so you can reach your classroom TV. You should plug this cable into the video in jack on the back of your classroom TV. If your TV doesn't have such an input, you can plug the cable from the camera into the video in jack on the back of your VCR. Remember to read your camera's instruction manual because there might be a button or setting you need to use for video out. Generally speaking, it's best to connect the cable to your camera before you turn on the camera. The only real drawback to using a digital still camera on a copy stand is that you will be running on batteries unless you have, or purchase, an AC power supply for your camera. An alternative to using a digital still camera is using an old camera or camcorder. Camcorders have two main systems: the camera and the recorder/player. Since the recorder part is a mechanical device, it usually breaks before the camera section does. Thus many broken cameras will still do the job, and you can probably get one for free from a local VCR/television repair store. The photo shows my old copy stand with a digital still camera mounted on it. The rig works better than most document cameras the building since the resolution on a still camera is a great deal higher than that on a motion camera. Using the macro or close-up setting on the camera lets you focus on objects as small as a deck of cards or a quarter. There are dozens of uses for a document camera pre-K-12 classrooms. For example, little books can become big books. You will no longer have to make transparencies, since print on paper projects nicely. And document cameras are particularly useful when teaching science, since small apparatus and demonstrations can be enlarged to fill the television screen. A friend recently told me of a unique use of a camera connected to a classroom television. It seems the enterprising teacher attached a large beanbag to the underside of her small camera with Velcro(r). She then placed the camera on her shoulder and aimed it at the book she was reading to the class, providing a bird's-eye view of the reading process. You can probably get about the same results by mounting the camera on a tripod placed just behind your shoulder. …