We’ve all been there. You want the whole class to be able to see a flower, a seed or a fossil. How do you show it to the whole class without an unseemly scrum around your desk? An easy solution is to use a visualiser.
A visualiser (also called a Document Camera) is essentially a small video camera that is connected directly to a data projector or to a computer which produces real-time images on a screen. The camera is typically mounted on an arm pointing downwards. Any object or document placed below the camera is projected up onto the screen for the whole class to see.
If the image is projected onto an interactive whiteboard, it would then be possible to use the pen tools to draw and annotate over the top of the image – perhaps labelling the key features or key words to describe the object.
It is not essential to have an interactive whiteboard, as long as the visualiser is connected to a projector (or large television screen) for displaying the image. Although from experience, I find that the combination of interactive whiteboard, projector and visualiser can be a very powerful one and getting a visualiser in addition to an interactive whiteboard, budget permitting, allows greater flexibility of working.
Using a visualiser in Science
Here are a couple of ideas for using one in the science classroom:
- Looking at Flowers. Display a real flower up close, and using the whiteboard tools pupils could annotate the petal, anther, stigma, sepal, filament
- Displaying “Minibeasts”. Look closely at invertebrates collected by the pupils from the school grounds such as woodlice, slugs and caterpillars. The pupils could place these minibeasts under the visualiser to take a close look at their different features and see how they moved.
- Demonstrating Electrical Circuits. If the circuits had deliberately been set up with a fault, the pupils could annotate on the IWB to show how they could be fixed.
- Use the zoom feature to look at objects in high detail such as mouldy bread or different types of fabric. Look closely at natural materials such as wood, rocks, stones, leaves, shells, pine cones.
- Demonstrating how to read scales on rulers, thermometers and other meters.
- Taking a close look at germinating seeds.
- Modelling which buttons to use on stopclocks, calculators and dataloggers.
- Display images from books, photographs, food labels without having to photocopy!
- Model graph drawing with real pencil, ruler and graph paper rather than trying to use the interactive whiteboard tools.
- Looking at inside of a child’s mouth to look at teeth (Some visualisers are mounted on a flexible arm, so not everything has to be directly below it, which makes this rather easier!)
- Displaying good examples of student work to the whole class.
- Displaying a worksheet – modelling how to fill it in prior to completion during the lesson. Also for modelling exam questions.
In summary
Visualisers make it much easier for the teachers to show resources and artefacts to the whole class, without having pupils crowding around struggling to see what is going on. Many teachers that have one make use of theirs almost every day across the entire curriculum, not just for science. Their simplicity to use, at least at a basic level, makes them something that many teachers and pupils can start using straight away. They make an excellent addition to any primary classroom.
