Last month, I chose mini whiteboards as my topic for the first post in a series on classroom tools that I’m calling ´Classroom Tech´. This month, the topic is visualisers. I haven’t seen these used in ELT classrooms ever and I’ve never heard them spoken about at conferences and webinars. That doesn’t mean they’re not being used, but it does suggest that more use could be made of them.
What are they?
Essentially, a visualiser is a high-quality external webcam that is flexible, allowing you to project a live image of something that exists physically in your classroom (a worksheet, a textbook, a photo, some student work), so that everyone can see it at once.
One key advantage to using a visualiser over writing directly on the whiteboard/smart board live is that you don’t turn your back on the class. This is important for a few reasons:
- You never know what’s happening behind your back. You might tell students that you do, but you don’t. If you have groups that are tricky to manage, the less time you show them your back, the better.
- Following on from the previous point, you can’t see when students are struggling to follow an explanation or an example if you aren’t facing them.
- On a human level, we like to see who we are talking to and whoever is talking to us. It’s a strange paradigm indeed where we ask people to come into a room and then turn our backs on them and demand they listen to us!
Why aren’t they being used more?
One immediate thought is their cost. They start at around €50 for the more basic models and can sell for several hundred euros for the higher quality ones. If you wanted to equip an academy with a decent quality visualiser in each of 5 classrooms, that’s easily €500 in capital outlay.
They’re also very “single-function”. Whilst the classroom laptop and display set-up can be used in multiple ways, a visualiser is only ever a visualiser.
What can we do with them?
Having explained why I think they’re a rare sight in the ELT wild, let’s look at the kinds of things that can be done with them:
- You distribute a worksheet and keep a copy for yourself. You can then sit at the teacher’s desk, face the students with your copy under the visualiser. You guide students to exercise 1 and read the instructions together, just as you would normally. Then, while doing the example together, they watch you complete the gap, tick a box, circle an answer exactly how you want them to do it with the rest of the exercise.
- I mentioned guiding students to where you’re looking in the previous point and this is something that in smaller classrooms is easily achieved simply by holding the course book or worksheet in front of your chest and pointing. In larger rooms, this becomes more complicated. With the visualiser, you can easily guide students to the part of the page you want them to focus on.
- You might just do the first one as an example of how to complete an exercise, but you might need or want to do more extensive modelling. The first time students encounter a key word transformation task, you’re hardly going to abandon them to do the whole task on their own! Or, perhaps you want to model the writing of an introduction with the students: while individuals suggest ideas, you write. Others can then critique the model with you guiding the discussion and making alterations live.
- Sometimes, students will mark their own work (or the work of a peer) with you providing answers. Often, they need to see answers written down to ensure accuracy of spelling etc. It’s always beneficial for students to see and hear the answers, even if you’re just circling the correct option in multiple choice. It’s always clear what’s going on with this approach. On the other hand, I’ve so often had to repeat the letter (or repeat the letter with its Spanish name) because one student mishears and repeats the wrong letter which then via process of Telephone becomes a third wrong answer before I’ve even drawn breath! With a visualiser, everyone can see which option is correct.
- On other occasions, writing tasks especially, you will be providing correction and feedback. Why not do this live? Take a piece of student’s work, display under the visualiser and correct it. Unlike doing this alone, however, you’ll read the text aloud and also narrate your thought process as you do so, adding corrections and annotations as normal. Ah, yes. Nice use of a linking word there, but oh dear, that’s not quite the right spelling, who can tell me what’s missing here? Yeh, that’s it. Double L in additionally. OK, new paragraph clearly signalled…and so on.
Are there any drawbacks?
Of course, not everything is plain sailing from the first moment out of the box; it takes some time and practice to get good with using them. If you’re thinking of trying one out, be aware of the following:
- The paper needs to stay still and the device needs to stay still. Otherwise, it ranges from annoying to downright unpleasant for your students as the worksheet dances around the screen!
- You are limited on the size of the visualisable area. You can often show anywhere from A4-A3, but the best use is found at around A5, in my opinion. This means having the visualiser relatively zoomed in and needing to reposition the work a lot.
- The visualiser and/or cables can be easily found in the path of your pen or the hand that holds it! You’ll get used to effective positioning with your device and how you write.
Last time, I suggested a workaround to purchasing class sets of mini whiteboards. Here’s a guide I’ve found for using an old smartphone as a DIY visualiser.
Overall, I’ve found my visualiser to be as indispensable as my set of mini whiteboards and I wouldn’t want to choose between them! If you use a visualiser too, do you have any other tips? If you don’t, how would you feel about trying one out?
Chris Richards ELT 