Making a "Free" Wireless Visualiser / Document Camera

In my teaching to date (two training placements) I've never used a visualiser in my lessons, or indeed even seen one used by other teachers. However, online I see lots of people singing their praises and discussing which are the best ones to use; and I've seen many people using them during online CPD courses.

I don't know how many teachers at my NQT school use visualisers, or if any of the rooms that I'll be using come September are equipped with them, but I thought I'd have an experiment at home to see how they can be used. I remember seeing someone on Twitter talking about using a mobile phone as a document camera and linking it to their existing visualiser software, so I thought I'd see if I could do something similar for as low a cost as possible.

It was a remarkably quick and easy job. Here's how I did it:

• there's a free app called "CamOn" available for Android phones which is designed allow a smartphone to be used as an IP camera. It makes the phone's camera image available either by using a web browser or a program that can view video streams. I installed this on an old smartphone.

• I spent just under £3 (including P&P!) on eBay for a phone holder with a flexible stem that can clip onto the edge of a desk. You can angle the phone's camera to point wherever you need.

• I installed the free Video LAN Client (VLC) software on my Windows PC and told it to view the CamOn stream from my phone.

 

That's all there is to it and it seems to work very well. You can play around with VLC so that it uses the full screen or only part of it if you want to project your visualiser image alongside a document on your PC.

A couple of technical details:

CamOn makes the phone camera video available at http://a.b.c.d:8080 (where a.b.c.d is the local IP address of the phone, and this is shown on the CamON screen display).

You can tweak setting within CamOn to change frame rate, video size, white balance, focus options etc.

If you use a video streaming program such as VLC, then you can access the stream using RTSP by entering the stream address: rtsp://a.b.c.d:8080/video/h264

You will need to confirm with your IT people that this will be allowed on your network if using in a school.

I've seen some people online using CamOn to create a video input for OBS when recording their own videos and I know lots of teachers have used OBS for their online lessons.

Teacher Pay Rises - Some Context

The public sector pay rises that made news headlines today included those for teachers in England. They were presented as a "new" increase and somehow connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact it was the detailed announcement of pay rises that were first put forward by the government in January 2020. This is an implementation of the recommendations made by the School Teachers' Review Body, whose report has also been published today: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-teachers-review-body-30th-report-2020.

The pay award is skewed to give those on lower pay scales a larger percentage pay rise than those at the higher levels; this is part of an effort to attempt to recruit and retain more people in the teaching profession.

The reaction by some people to today's announcement on radio programmes and in social media has shocked me. I've felt the need to calm myself down by writing this blog and putting the rise into some sort of context - mainly for my own sanity.

I did my engineering degree in the 1980s and worked for almost 20 years in the electronics industry. By the end of that period, I earned a good salary with lots of benefits including private healthcare, 5-weeks paid holiday, a generous, final-salary pension scheme etc. At no point do I recall anyone trying to tell me that I was overpaid, or that I didn't deserve any of the pay rises or benefits that I was given or that my job was cushy. Perhaps this is because I was working in the private sector and because people didn't generally feel that they understood what my job entailed? 

After spending the last decade working in my own business I have just spent a year training to be a teacher, completing a PGCE in secondary science. I love physics and I really want to try to encourage more young people to be interested in learning science.

So, now I am about to start work as a newly-qualified teacher. I'm using the same degree qualification that I gained 30 years ago; I've topped that up with a year at University gaining a PGCE. I won't be starting at the very bottom of the teachers' pay scale, but just to put teachers' salaries in context: my starting wage will be approximately 42% of the salary that I gave up when I resigned from my engineering job in 2007.

On top of that, I know that teaching will be a much more challenging role than my previous jobs in industry, and I will have far greater responsibility: I will actually be responsible for part of a young person's education. And yet now I am opening myself up to the kind of criticism I have seen today?

We need more teachers. We need more people to enter the profession. I'm really saddened to read the kind of anti-teacher comments that I've seen today because they will only serve to put people off taking the kind of steps that I have just done.

I guess this will pass as yesterday's news, but we really need, as a country, to elevate the status of the teaching profession.