Zoomtext is a great software which integrates multiple features for visually impaired population. With the new Zoomtext 10, you can now setup an USB web cam as an inexpensive CCTV alternative. Here is an example of how to setup an IPEVO Ziggi USB doc cam with Zoomtext.

Related article: Zoom In with IPEVO Doc Cams and ZoomText

We recently heard from a customer named Pat who told us about her experience with the Ziggi USB Document Camera. Pat let us in on a new way to use Ziggi — as an aid for the visually impaired. It’s a nifty story that might help others, and we’d like to share it with you. Pat told us about a program called ZoomText which, when used with a webcam, allows significant zoom-in and other visual enhancements of images in order to display text or objects nice and big on the computer screen.

“I love this camera,” Pat wrote to us. “I am visually impaired and I use this to read documents, mail, notes, credit card numbers, etc. I also use it with Skype and ZoomText 10. It adjusts easily to almost any position you might need and the auto focus is fairly quick.” We had never heard of ZoomText before, so we did a little investigation and experimentation using both Ziggi and the Point 2 View doc cam. Pat is definitely on to something— both Ziggi and the Point 2 View work great with the ZoomText software.

Both of IPEVO’s cameras feature high-res image quality and a Macro mode to capture close-ups and fine details. On top of these features, ZoomText offers multiple high-contrast color schemes, an up to 36x digital zoom, and clarity controls to make the image even sharper. So, it appears ZoomText and IPEVO doc cams are a great match for visually-impaired individuals in need of accessibility features on their computer. Capture a document with Ziggi or the Point 2 View, then blow it up and make it even more readable with ZoomText. Sounds like a winning combination to us! We’ll let Pat sum up her feelings on the subject: “The resolution beats all other webcams I’ve seen. My husband bought several webcams recently and all were inferior to this product. Ziggi is a wonderful camera for a great price.”

We are really excited that Ziggi and the Point 2 View have the potential to make documents more accessible for the visually impaired. We invite you to check out ZoomText. And as always, feel free to share your own story about our document cameras by writing to Customer Service at cs@ipevo.com.

Here’s wishing you a great 2013!

UDL is a term which has enjoyed a renewed focus in educational circles recently, and we wanted to tell you how the IPEVO Document Cameras — Ziggi and the Point 2 View — can help educators achieve this promising approach to learning.

What is UDL? It stands for Universal Design for Learning. It’s a concept that takes up after the universal design movement in architecture. In the same way that buildings can be designed to accommodate the most diverse range of people — like an entrance ramp that could serve bike riders, moms with strollers, and those in wheelchairs — UDL is a framework which encourages curriculum to be designed for the most diverse range of students. UDL acknowledges that no two students learn in quite the same way. As such, “more is more” when it comes to curriculum. By multiplying your methods and your media, you will reach more students and achieve better results overall.

UDL has three major elements:

Representation — Presenting material in many different ways and through multiple media

Expression — Allowing students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways

Engagement — Making sure there are multiple ways to engage learners and instill that very important “love of learning”

And this is where IPEVO ed tech comes in. Ziggi and the Point 2 View give you the ability to present material in new ways. Just check out our Top 50 ways that educators can use document cameras and 50 MORE ways for ideas. That’s a mind-boggling range of ways to both present material and get your students excited about learning. When you multiply the opportunities for students to engage the material, you’re fostering a more universal (and thus more effective) learning environment.

Finding the right mix of teaching methods that “click” with your students is part of the challenge, but it’s also part of the fun. Ziggi and the Point 2 View can help you improve your teaching according to all three UDL elements — Representation, Expression and Engagement. It brings material closer to students than ever before, and it opens up a new level of interactivity that can really make a difference in your class.

Remember: We DO accept school purchase orders, and we DO have volume discount rates on both Ziggi and the Point 2 View. Contact sales-america@ipevo.com for more information. Try one of our affordable document cameras in your class: you won’t be disappointed!

We’re rolling out a brand new software app for all of our USB document cameras, including the Point 2 View and Ziggi. It’s called IPEVO Presenter, and it’s still got everything you need to quickly and easily get amazing image captures in the classroom. But in addition to a more user-friendly interface, Presenter also has a few extra tricks up its sleeve to make your experience even better.

And one of these new features we’re excited to tell you about is integrated Evernote support.

Evernote is a powerful, multimedia notetaking application that has particular value for teaching and learning, not to mention business collaboration and project management. Almost anything you can think of — audio files, pictures, text, entire web pages — can be arranged in an Evernote notebook.

As for IPEVO Presenter, a new Evernote mode allows you to take snapshots with your doc cam and then send those captures directly to the Evernote notebook of your choice. Take high-quality captures of textbook pages, handwritten notes, artwork, math equations, charts and graphs, or anything else, and then round up all those captures and send them to Evernote in just a couple of clicks.

You can probably see the potential for Evernote support, but let’s discuss a couple of the advantages. Evernote is available for Android, iPhones, iPad, PCs, and just about every mobile device out there. That means your doc cam images can now be viewed and managed on whatever device you like. Your captures are instantly more portable and more versatile.

Also consider that you can share notebooks with other Evernote users. Whether you’re a teacher sharing class notes with your students, a businessperson collaborating on a project, or a student organizing a group study session before the big exam, there’s a lot to like about Evernote’s ability to share.

We’ll give you one more reason to use Evernote with your doc cam. Evernote’s search function — set up very similar to the Google search bar in your browser — can not only search typed notes, but also images with text. Capture textbook text or even your handwritten class notes, upload them to Evernote, and now you have a searchable archive so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.

If all of this sounds cool, that’s probably because… it is! And there are even more ways to accelerate teaching and learning when you use Evernote and your IPEVO doc cam. Head on over to the Evernote home page to find out more. The basic Evernote app is downloadable for free, and there’s a premium upgrade with additional benefits.

IPEVO’s Evernote support gives you one more way to take teaching and learning to the next level, so download your free Evernote account and see what inspires you.

We won’t bore you with a long introduction. Here are the first fifty ideas for document cameras in the classroom. And here are fifty other ideas to use IPEVO’s Ziggi or Point 2 View USB Document Cameras to add variety, multimedia, utility, or just plain fun to learning.

We’d love to hear what you think. Any other ideas you’d like to share with educators?

51. Brainstorming — Write down ideas, and everyone can see the ideas as you go.
52. Votes and polls — Take a vote and show the results.
53. Digital flash cards — Study time just got more effective.
54. Stop-motion animations — Several customers have reported using our doc cams to perform educational stop-motion projects.
55. Biology — Share small live animals (like worms and insects) with crystal-clear detail.
56. Class pet — Have a class pet, like a gerbil? Create a “Gerbil Cam.”
57. Economics — Display charts, graphs, data and more for an economics, business, or marketing class.
58. Timelines — Help your visual learners with a timeline of historical events or things like the age of the dinosaurs.
59. Puzzles — For early learners, assemble a puzzle and let the class help you.
60. Tell time — Show how to tell time or read a calendar.
61. Sorting and identification — Take small objects and guide the class through sorting and identifying them.
62. Homework — Keep students on track by displaying tomorrow’s homework assignment.
63. Musical instruments — Demonstrate proper fingering on a recorder, for one example.
64. Sports — Introduce the basic rules of games and sports in physical education class.
65. Foreign languages — Share words, grammar rules, and side-by-side translations of foreign languages.
66. Poetry — Help students understand rhyme, meter, style and structure of poems.
67. Game time — Have fun with Boggle, Word Scramble, Hangman, Jeopardy!, or similar games.
68. Literature — Identify and compare literary genres and writing styles.
69. Grammar — Demonstrate and correct common grammar mistakes, like “i before e” or “than versus then.”
70. Round-robin reading — Read a play or book round-robin style so all students can participate and follow along.
71. Show off — When a student does a great job, reward them by showing off their perfect paper, test, or worksheet.
72. Math formulas — Don’t recreate math problems or formulas from the textbook. Save time and just show the textbook.
73. Phonics — Teach phonics, sentence construction, parts of speech, etc.
74. Preserve fragile items — For fragile or expensive items you want to share, show it with the doc cam rather than passing it around.
75. Color wheel — Show the colors in the color wheel, show how colors mix to create other colors, etc.
76. ESL/ESOL — Supply a valuable visual complement to oral teaching for students whose first language is not English.
77. Blow up text — Go big on tiny text, for your benefit or for the benefit of your students.
78. Tech tutorial — Teach how to use a digital camera, for one example. A doc cam is perfect to pick up all the small controls and menus.
79. Time-lapse photography — Take a snapshot of stages in a process, like a seed growing into a plant, for a terrific time-lapse photography project.
80. Environmental print cards — These cards are great for “reading readiness” for early learners. Sort and identify.
81. Fine textures — Our doc cams are ideal for showing details from anything with fine texture, like wood grain or fabric.
82. Round-robin drawing — Draw an object, then have students take turns adding more to the drawing.
83. Art analysis — For a test or in-class exercise, display artwork from a textbook or photo book and have students analyze it.
84. Getting closer to students — As a replacement for a whiteboard or chalkboard, a doc cam allows you to sit down and get closer to your students.
85. Proofreading — Demonstrate how to proofread a paper and how to use proofreader’s marks.
86. Drama — Drama teachers can display scripts or text from plays.
87. Political cartoons — Comic strips and political cartoons can often help spur discussion in a fun way.
88. Software tutorial — Step through a software application on the computer.
89. Make words — Rearrange magnetic letters to form words in preschool or kindergarten.
90. Picture schedule — Younger students can benefit from pictures representing what will happen that day, or things like a picture of a backpack to remind them to stow their backpacks in their cubbyholes at the beginning of the day.
91. Remote learning — Use either Ziggi or Point 2 View as a webcam for remote learning sessions and one-on-one tutoring.
92. Pen pals — Similar to #91, coordinate with a teacher in another country to create a unique pen pal program with real-time video between classrooms.
93. Mock courtroom — Doc cams are being used more and more in real courts of law to show evidence and court documents. Use it the same way for a mock trial.
94. Picture-to-story — Show a picture or pictures with the doc cam, and then have students create a story based upon those pictures.
95. Absentees — Snap pictures of today’s curriculum, homework assignments, math problems, or class notes for absent students.
96. Teleprompter — Use the doc cam and projector like a teleprompter when practicing speeches or staging debates.
97. Bingo — Host a fun game of Math Bingo or other types of Bingo.
98. Fill-in-the-blank — Involve the class in fill-in-the-number math sequences or vocabulary-building fill-in-the-word exercises.
99. Performance backdrop — When having students stage a play for the class, display a suitable picture backdrop for the scene using the doc cam, and then angle your projector at a 45 degree angle downward toward the actors. Instant backdrop!
100. Straight lines — Project a lined sheet of white paper onto the whiteboard. You now have nice straight lines when you or your students write on the board.

In our previous entry, we brainstormed some ways students can use IPEVO’s Ziggi and the Point 2 View Document Cameras.

But let’s now talk about document cameras in the classroom from the teacher’s point of view, from kindergarten to college. We put our heads together — and relied on a lot of feedback from educators we’ve talked to via email or in-person at Ed Tech conferences — to come up with 100 ways document cameras can enhance learning in the classroom.

And here (drum roll, please) are the first fifty. Have other ideas to share? Please leave a comment!

1. Chemistry lab — Demonstrate the steps of a science experiment.
2. Replace transparencies — Transparencies take time to make and require an expensive, hot overhead projector. Work more comfortably, and more quickly, with a versatile doc cam.
3. Steps of an assignment — Display the requirements for a test or homework assignment.
4. Digital clock — Capture a stop watch or egg timer for a cheap but effective way to keep students on task for tests and in-class assignments.
5. Math manipulatives — A doc cam is a great way to work out math problems.
6. Geometry — Teach shapes, angles, and how to use tools like the compass and protractor.
7. School board meetings — Doc cams are not just for students. Conduct meetings and display assessment data, agenda points, or anything else.
8. Study guide — Use the snapshot feature to capture images of notes or pages from the textbook. Faster than scanning!
9. Handwriting — Demonstrate proper technique and letter formation.
10. Maps in social studies — Say goodbye to huge pull-down maps.
11. Graphs — Teach about slopes, the x axis and y axis, and other concepts in a visual way.
12. Calculator — Show the class how to use a scientific calculator.
13. Daily agenda — Get everyone on the same page by displaying today’s agenda.
14. Thought of the day — Share a quotation or encouraging thought to start the day off right.
15. Let a student teach — Have a student demonstrate for the class. It’s sometimes the best way to learn.
16. Model note taking — Taking good notes is essential to education. Show them how.
17. Impress parents — Take snapshots of items from the day’s curriculum and share with parents.
18. Picture/photo books — You may have only one of an expensive book. Now you can share with everyone.
19. “Microscope” — Zoom and Macro mode will capture fine details from circuit boards, for one example.
20. Construction — Show students how to build or construct something.
21. Essay writing — Give an interactive lesson about the parts of a good essay.
22. Corrections — Correct a student’s work for the benefit of the classroom.
23. Reader’s theatre — Display text from the script as students perform.
24. Food — Teach how to read nutrition labels and ingredients, or share a recipe.
25. Current events — Spur discussion with pictures or magazine/newspaper clippings.
26. Measuring tools — Teach about thermometers, rulers, etc.
27. In-class contest — Keep everyone excited by keeping track of an in-class contest, such as reading a certain number of books during the year.
28. Grades — Visually share how a project (like an essay) will be graded: 25% for grammar, 25% for thesis, etc.
29. Dissections — From frogs to fish, doc cams are perfect for demonstrating dissections in science class.
30. Help for visual impairments — Give any visually-impaired students large, readable text.
31. Reading aloud — Help your visual learners by displaying text as you read aloud. Or, have students read from the displayed text.
32. Early readers — Related to #31, early readers can particularly benefit from watching your finger track text left to right. Plus, storybooks are more fun when students can clearly see the pictures.
33. Parts of a book— Identify things like the title page, table of contents and glossary.
34. Origami — Have fun with an origami lesson where everyone can follow along and attempt their own.
35. Typography — Compare fonts and page layouts in a graphic design class.
36. Rules — Establish your classroom’s rules with a list.
37. Word of the day — Have a word of the day or create word walls/vocab walls.
38. Art portfolios — Capture your students’ art projects with a snapshot and create an invaluable portfolio for student and parent.
39. PowerPoint — Images captured from the doc cam can be used in multimedia presentations like PowerPoint or iMovie.
40. Freeze frame — Snap an image during a crucial part of a science experiment, for one example, so that moment can be discussed later.
41. Sheet music — Teach musical annotation, or display music for band class.
42. Dictionary — Capture an actual page to show students how to use the dictionary.
43. Money — Use real coins to teach about money or solve math problems.
44. Diagrams — Show how to solve word problems in math by drawing diagrams.
45. iPad — Apple’s iPad has a growing number of educational apps that you can share.
46. Architecture — From dioramas to intricate scale models, get up close and personal with 3D objects.
47. Geology — Show fine details from different kinds of rocks.
48. Art technique — A doc cam is perfect for demonstrating your drawing, painting, or sculpture technique in art class.
49. Test answers — Display the test as you go over test answers to increase comprehension.
50. Archive — Snap day-to-day images and archive them so you have a record of your curriculum.

IPEVO‘s Ziggi and Point 2 View USB document cameras offer teachers some great opportunities for interactive, multimedia learning in the classroom that can engage and excite students. And we have tons of ideas to share with educators.

But for now, let’s flip the script, turn the tables, put the shoe on the other foot, and take a look at Ziggi and Point 2 View from a student’s perspective. How can students — whether it’s elementary school, middle school, high school, or college — use document cameras to take their own learning to the next level?

We’ve brainstormed plenty of ideas, and maybe you can add some of your own.

So without further ado, here are 25 ways students can use Ziggi and/or Point 2 View document cameras in the classroom. (And parents, this will give you lots of ideas, too.) Plenty more ideas for educators will be on the way in future entries!

1. Save math formulas — Use the one-touch snapshot feature and Review mode to capture useful formulas from your math textbook to save for later.
2. Study with a friend — Have a remote study session with a classmate and share test materials, class notes, or textbooks. But no copying, and no cheating!
3. Tutor time — Ziggi and Point 2 View make it possible to work with your teacher or tutor from anywhere.
4. Show and tell — For younger students (and teachers, you can show them how), show and tell is taken up a notch when everyone can see details on the big projector screen. No more complaints that students can’t see.
5. Better class notes — Enhance the notes you take in class by capturing small text passages, graphs, maps, data, or anything else from the textbook, and adding it to your notes.
6. Book report —Take your book report from good to great by presenting a sample page from the book and reading it for the class so they can follow along.
7. Play scene — Students acting out a scene from a play in class can display the scene in text form on the screen so the audience has two ways of understanding the play.
8. Art appreciation — Collect a semester’s worth of your favorite images from an art textbook or photo book using the snapshot feature and Review mode.
9. Diorama — Have you built a diorama? Give the class a close-up view of the diorama’s details.
10. All-subject essay helper — Students in upper grades and college need to cite and quote sources, data, and other texts in their essays. Use the doc cam to display the info on screen for easy reference and copying.
11. Help for the visually-impaired — Visually-impaired students can benefit from Ziggi and Point 2 View’s Macro mode and digital zooms for large, readable text.
12. Science fair project — Lots of science experiment ideas could benefit from some real-time video or snapshots, whether you’re presenting for the class or testing your hypothesis.
13. Help! — Stuck on a homework problem? Take a snapshot and email your teacher for help. Or, post the image to Facebook to get your classmates’ help.
14. Multimedia presentations — Save images from the doc cam and use them in PowerPoint, Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, and more.
15. Art class — Proud students can show off their latest painting, sketch, mixed media piece or sculpture for the whole class.
16. Side by side copying — Need to type up text from a worksheet or textbook? Use the doc cam to project it onto your computer to save time.
17. Web chats — Did you know both Ziggi and Point 2 View can be angled up and used like web cams? You never know when students will benefit from some face to face time.
18. Restricted texts — Take a snapshot of text you might not be able to take with you, like books in the library, a friend’s class notes, or books reserved for classroom use only.
19. Give your eyes a break — Hours of studying tiny text can result in eye strain and fatigue. Give yourself a break by displaying tiny text on the computer and zooming in.
20. Quality, not quantity — Posters, graphs, and charts are often made so they are large enough for the class to see. By projecting these items for presentations, they don’t have to be so large, saving time and material.
21. Add visuals to an oral presentation — Every student has to deliver an oral presentation. Give it some visual punch with accompanying images or text using the doc cam.
22. English literature — Need to analyze a passage from a text you’re writing about? Use the doc cam to put the text side by side with your word processor doc on the screen.
23. Nature “microscope” — Leaves, insects, dissections… you can learn more about anything complex and intricate by getting a closer view that’s still nice and sharp.
24. Cram for the exam — Host a study session with several classmates, and display test materials, flash cards, sample questions, etc., onscreen so everyone can have a look and participate.
25. Student becomes teacher — Use the doc cam as a presentational tool to teach other students how to solve math problems, construct something, or proofread a paper.

What ways can YOU think of for students to use Ziggi and Point 2 View? Let us know. And remember, many ideas for educators are on their way soon.