Google Slides + Document Camera = Curated Class Notes

Four days of instruction in the new school year and an aha moment has already happened. Mrs. Lydon, World Language teacher, and I were certainly geeking out when we made this discover.

‘Old’ Process

There are some teachers who like to document all of the learning that has happened in a class period, or part of the class instruction, from the white board. Mrs. Lydon specifically likes to take pictures of the new vocabulary that the students learned in her Spanish I course and add them to a Google Slide deck. This way, students have a one stop shop to find the new terms to practice. In the past, she would take a picture of the whiteboard with her phone and then email all of the images to herself. She would then download them to her computer and insert each image on its own slide. (Others instead, open up the Google Drive app on their phone and take pictures right through the app. This way they can immediately be uploaded their Google Drive and can be quickly located on the computer.)

‘New’ Process

In talking through how to use the IPEVO document camera with Mrs. Lydon, we accidentally discovered something amazing! We were able to insert images right to Google Slides using a document camera. AMAZING!

Several months ago, Google allowed users the ability to insert images from the laptop/chromebook camera eyesight via the insert menu. With this feature, we have had students in the past upload their own work in a math/science classroom. This allowed the students to make some of their work digital. But I never thought about using this same idea with ‘teacher work’ or ‘class curated work’ using the document camera. Below are the steps to make this happen.

Process:

1. Create the shell of your Google Slide Presentation.
2. Plug in your document camera in the USB slot of your computer (we use IPEVO document cameras – in fact, we have the original document cameras  – and they still work great).
3. Select Insert, Image, Camera (see image above). A pop up window will appear showing that the camera on the computer has been activated.
4. Line up the document camera to the spot of the whiteboard you want to capture (don’t forget to focus the document camera so that the content comes out clear)
5. Take Image. Image will appear on the slide where cursor can be found.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you have all necessary images.

Sure this idea will work for some classes and not for others OR will work for specific instances in a class and not for others. Yes, students should understand and model the skill of taking notes. This blog post in no means is to indicate that students should not take notes at all and that it is only the teachers responsibility to provide what was discuss in class. Rather, the intent of this blog post is to share an aha moment that was discovered. None of this is earth shattering and maybe some people have known this for awhile. Just one of those scenarios where you go, why didn’t I think of this sooner? If you would like to talk more about how to use a document camera in class, you know where to find me.

And that is my Spiel…