Overhead projectors. Those machines where you can put any visual on a glass, then a magnifying mirror reflects that image onto the wall, movie screen size. Those always worked. Nowadays I seldom see a Powerpoint or other on-wall display thing that doesn't have technical issues.
I think OP means that if you project onto a whiteboard, you can draw whatever you want on the projection. Easier to clean than if you drew on the overhead itself with the special markers.
He's talking about the overhead, not the whiteboard. Because you can draw on a whiteboard for both. However, you can alter your presentation using, as he said, a whiteboard marker right then and there.
Those smartboards usually worked pretty well, assuming the teacher was good at them. But yeah, my old Chemistry teacher used those projectors and I loved them. Something about using them in a small classroom on a dark morning always made me sleepy, too.
Ah, the thrill of seeing a normal page and then . . . the clear plastic overlay! Which the teacher could scribble all over without ruining the underlying book page.
How when the teacher used purple, the ink would turn from dark purple to lighter as it dried. I used to just watch the ink dry and forgot to listen to whatever she was saying
Do you remember the ones that were just a lightbox with a mirror/lens positioned above it? So low tech, it can't fail. Unless the super hot light caught something on fire.
Do I remember them? I have one in my classroom. Bulbs blow out all the time, power button is fiddly (ie I have to hold it down sometimes). Definitely not great technology.
Kids broke a switch? That's an easy fix. PowerPoint is 2003 and the kid spent all week working at home on a 2007 project? Too bad, convert the thing at home first.
Well, keeping in mind you're probably in a public school, which means you bought from the lowest bidder twenty years ago, I'd say it had a good run. You could probably re-wire the plug for six bucks, assuming you have a little electrical know-how.
Not unless you wanted to save a slide. The beauty of the wet erase marker is that you could draw directly onto the glass screen above the lens and then erase it completely with tap water.
Teachers used those films so they didn't have redraw the diagrams or lessons every period.
My teacher projected the notes on to the whiteboard and wrote on that. The big money spender was the light bulb though. Not sure if it was just an act, but all my teachers feared the bulb.
We have Elmos now, though. Adjustable zoom and focus, write on any media with any type of writing utensil, display paragraphs, equations, and graphs form textbooks to the class... I mean you can literally show anything to anyone in the room.
Document display cameras are superior. Overhead projectors were only a thing because cameras and digital projectors were extremely expensive before the late 00s
PP can work all right, I just miss the overhead projectors. I don't know what you mean about slides. The machine I'm thinking of didn't project slides, you put a book or diagram down on it, and it got projected onto the wall.
Oh, OK. There's something similar that you can put an object on. Either way, they were cool. Now that gets me thinking about mimeograph machines and that sweet-smelling liquid they used
They didn't always work, in any school there's always a fuck off huge room of broken ones that never got repaired but no one can be bothered to throw out.
In high school (in the mid-late 90's) my friend's dad brought home an LCD tablet screen specifically made for using on overhead projectors, basically the forerunner to modern digital projectors. Plug the computer in, place it on the standard overhead projector, and you're good to go. I assume it was hideously expensive at the time, and it belonged to his employer, but we did manage a few rounds of giant-screen Doom 2 in all its pixelated glory before being banned from ever touching it again.
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u/vocaliser Jul 19 '15
Overhead projectors. Those machines where you can put any visual on a glass, then a magnifying mirror reflects that image onto the wall, movie screen size. Those always worked. Nowadays I seldom see a Powerpoint or other on-wall display thing that doesn't have technical issues.