Talking new tools for the trade
Inherent in the digital classroom is the need to wield some basic devices that allow us to transform live, written, or in-person learning components into accessible and interactive resources. This series will walk through various types or classes of tech hardware that you might wish to add to your process. We will attempt to look at a variety of tools and options as well as how some of these tools can be used in multiple or unexpected ways.
Beauty Shot (?)
Our first entry in this series was about the importance of audio and microphones; now we’ll attempt to add a video component to our classrooms.
Just for fun (and because I entered college in 1994 with a sweet Packard-Bell Pentium rig equipped with a Logitech Quickcam much like this one), I looked up the statistics and features of some of those early webcams that were available for use with computers. The first webcams were grayscale (16 shades) and ran at a resolution of 320 x 240. For comparison, I currently use a Logitech C920 I got for about $90 a few years ago that has 68 billion colors and a resolution of 1920 x 1080. My students all have Chromebooks equipped with webcams that record in 720p (1280×720) in billions of colors. This is to say nothing of the phones many carry in their pockets that contain cameras only dreamed of just a few years ago.
Video is the medium of this generation – from TikTok to Instagram to Snapchat, etc., our students live in a visual world and to ignore the value or importance of video in education is to put ourselves at a disadvantage. In this episode of the series, we will look at webcams and their utility in the classroom.
Click Here or the video below:
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Photo taken by Bhavesh Chauhan. Used under Creative Commons-Sharealike 3.0
LL,ed.
