On the whole, the job of a Computer instructor is fun on it's own. However, there are peaks. Learning how to use these new digital microscopes was defiantly a big one. I love gadgets and these are great. The QX5 Computer Microscope was obtained for our school by one of our second grade teachers last year. I was asked to set them up to be used with our Laptop cart. We at first had some issues using these with MAC OSx. windows was no problem at all. After some hunting around we were able to find some MAC friendly drivers. The microscope itself looks very cool. It has three powers of magnification, 10x, 60x, and 200x. They are really useful in that they have overhead lighting and underneath lighting also. The software package that comes with them is pretty fun to. There are options to save your magnified picture or video along with ways to record observations or even draw on the magnified pictures.
The microscopes were used pretty exclusively by second grade last year. I have heard interest from fourth and am hoping more levels will try these microscopes out with their lessons. Here is a video demo of the scope I found online.
The only drawback is that the original picture needs to be a really good quality picture. Otherwise it'll get blurrier the larger you go with it. My latest poster is an over-sized keyboard. There are instances everyday where it would be great to have a large keyboard on the wall to demonstrate specific keystrokes to the Students. It took a while for me to get this done though because of finding a good quality picture. Any picture I would take would be too shiny or too grainy. I lucked out the other day and found a great image online that came real close to matching our keyboards. I took this picture and ran it through PosteRazor to create a poster 10 pages wide (portrait) and three pages high. I was very happy with the results. So if your looking for a great utility, this is it. Check out the link and have fun.
