Document Cameras and Panopto

When you're teaching online, there may be times when you need to use a document camera.  The good news is that you can use Panopto to work as a doc cam:

Share your screen

Panopto can record anything you have on your screen, not just PowerPoint. Just make sure you hide anything on your desktop that you don't want students to see. 

• Use Word, OneNote, Excel, any other program you can type or draw on, and students will see it on most of their screen. 
• Open Preview (on a Mac) or Adobe Reader (on either platform) and you can annotate documents. This works best if you have a touch screen and a stylus, but you can mark up a document and have that recorded on the video. 

Hack a document cam

For both of these, we recommend using a thick marker to help students see what you're writing. Bring your own duct tape and AA batteries. 

Use a webcam pointed down at a piece of paper: If you have a webcam that plugs into your computer, you can move that camera into any position you'd like. With a little MacGyver engineering you can suspend this webcam above a piece of paper. You can treat this webcam just as you would treat your classroom document camera.  

Use your phone camera: If you don't have more than one webcam, with Zoom, you can screen share from a mobile device Links to an external site.. Use those MacGyver skills to prop your phone up Links to an external site. over a piece of paper, then treat that paper like a normal document camera.