The Elmo Projector

Technology in the classroom is vastly growing. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school, my teachers used chalk on the blackboard to write. At the end of your day, after using chalk to write all day, you were bound to have chalk all over you; from your dried-out-hands, to your clothes, where you wiped your hands off, to your face, where you scratched that itch. Nonetheless, it was messy, it squeaked, and it made people sneeze, but it worked.

Then I got to high school and the majority had white boards with dry erase makers. This was fun. Growing up I enjoyed writing with a whiteboard and marker. A fall back to this though was that it could also be messy. When my teacher was in the middle of teacher his/her lesson and had to erase, they would just wipe off the unwanted text with their hand instead of the eraser. The change from the ordinary chalkboard to a white board seemed to be more effective. It helped with the allergies to chalk, but yet, the markers never did smell the best.

Now I’m in college. I walk into my classes and there is a projection screen that hangs from the ceiling and a projector that is mounted to the ceiling. This was the first big difference I noticed. When I was in high school the projector sat on a stack of books on a rolling cart. It was very stationary. In the front of my college classrooms is an Elmo. I remember when I first saw an Elmo. I had no idea, what-so-ever, what this machine was. But I soon found out, as it is the only thing that a lot of my professors use.

An Elmo is the latest and greatest version of an overhead projector. With an Elmo you are able to put a worksheet, or a blank sheet of paper, as my professors do, and write on it and it appears on the screen; whereas with the overhead projector it would black out the screen. Using an Elmo prevents the allergies of chalk and the smells of the dry erase markers. All you need now is pen and paper. Another way that I have seen an Elmo in my classroom is presenting work to the the rest of the class. There is an Elmo projector in the Math class, my professor has had students come up to the front of the class and had students just set their spiral under the lens and explain how they worked through a certain problem.

I think that an Elmo is a great thing to have in a classroom. It is another way to bring the group together and another technique of collaboration. Here is an article published by Kristen Wilkerson that goes along with the changing in technology over the years.

Images retrieved from Flickr.