Guest post written by John Dabell.

John trained as a primary school teacher 25 years ago, starting his career in London and then teaching in a range of schools in the Midlands. In between teaching jobs, he has worked as an Ofsted inspector, national in-service provider, project manager, writer and editor. You can follow him on Twitter @John_Dabell.

The HUE HD Pro is the consummate multi-tasker and a flexible classroom companion you can always rely on to support instruction and increase engagement. Teacher-friendly and easy-to-use, a HUE camera can transform teaching and learning both in the classroom and at home facilitating innovative, modern teaching methods right across the curriculum. When it comes to lending a helping hand in your literacy lessons, there is plenty a HUE can do.

Here are some examples:

Shared reading

It’s not always easy to get hold of the right text in digital form and you might only have one hard copy of a book in your library. With a HUE camera, you can easily share text with your class and students can access any book, almost as if they had their own copy. They can take turns reading aloud from the pages as the rest of the class follows along, increasing fluency and engagement.

Modelling

Visualisers can vastly improve the quality of explanation and modelling because they enable teachers to show pupils a wider range of high-quality models than they would otherwise be able to. For example you can model editing as you write by deliberately making spelling mistakes, using incorrect grammar or editing word choice.

Modelling can provide instant, adaptive scaffolding support to pupils and enable you to continually assess levels of understanding making it easier to more accurately judge when it is appropriate to start scaling back support.

Recording movie footage of WAGOLL and then playing on repeat allows your pupils to copy, whilst you walk around the class to support. Carefully guided scaffolded practice thus provides pupils with the opportunity to practice and develop mastery.

You can model how to write an answer to test questions from start to finish and what makes a robust response. You can go through a series of questions that award different marks and apply the BUG method to all questions (Box the command word, Underline key ideas to focus in, Glance over the question to make sure you include everything).

By sharing your writing with a class, you are also helping to develop a culture of self-assessment and independent reflection.

Annotating

Your HUE HD Pro allows you to annotate literary texts to the class ‘in the moment’ whilst discussing the thought process behind the annotations. This will let you highlight important passages and make annotations directly over books and documents.

Reviewing and feedback

A HUE HD Pro has tremendous potential for pupils to instantly share, explain and give or receive feedback on written work.

This can be done so that work remains anonymous or it can be shared publicly and discussed openly and improved through collective editing. Reviewing together using a HUE camera helps everyone visualise better, promoting interaction and deeper learning conversations whilst improving focus.  

When children are completing tasks and you spot work that stands out, you can place the pupil’s work under your document camera within seconds, bring the class together and analyse what is excellent or where a misconception has occurred. This helps pupils to receive immediate feedback creating responsive teaching and live differentiation/stretch/support.

Pupils become more aware when they regularly see their own work, and that of their peers, especially when we highlight where their weaknesses lie, i.e. punctuation missing, not enough adventurous vocabulary, capital letters needed, spelling mistakes etc.

Animating

Children love creating stories especially when they can dive into a world of animation and engage in the process of making and editing video for themselves to share with others; HUE Animation Studio is the perfect tool.

This award-winning complete stop motion animation kit includes the HUE HD camera, HUE Animation software and 64-page book. Animation projects can be uploaded directly to YouTube, school sharing sites or shared with families and friends.

Video conferencing

Meeting an author online or a key figure you want to interview is easier than ever and your visualiser can be used to do just that. You can hold a Q&A between your students and speakers from around the world. Using your HUE HD Pro makes interacting with others a doddle. Use it for live streaming and video calls over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet for remote guided home learning.

Improve note-taking skills

Your HUE HD Pro is the perfect sidekick for sharing top tips and best practices with your class such as how to take notes.

Note-taking is a skill that can help children do well in all their schoolwork – everything from taking tests to researching a website or blog. Model what to do and share with children the skills they need to get the maximum potential from their note-taking.

Hone handwriting

Everyone needs to brush up on their penmanship and visualisers can help to improve handwriting formation as children can see the finer details of writing as it’s being written.

Zoom in on your own handwriting to share how to hold a pen and how to form individual letters and words. Amplify your thoughts and demonstrate the ‘how to’ in a clear, quick and efficient way as well as showcase other pupil’s work for peer review.

Improve presentation skills

A document camera is part of the classroom community and not just for teacher use. When talking about a piece of their own written work it can be used by pupils as a presentational tool to craft their self-expression. Pupils can become teachers giving them valuable opportunities to stand up and talk. If you record presentations at different points throughout the year, pupils can see their own growth and improvements in speaking and listening.

Punchy punctuation

Your HUE HD Pro is the ideal tool for getting a laser-sharp focus on the proper use of punctuation. Pupils can be given ‘faulty’ sentences to correct and decide where punctuation is missing or is superfluous. Create and share practice exercises and discuss how the same sentence can be punctuated in half a dozen different ways.

Model dictionary/thesaurus skills

Model sophisticated word use to promote word consciousness and vocabulary growth by sharing different types of dictionaries. Place a dictionary under the camera and pupils can be shown how to locate words efficiently, understand their meaning, and learn to spell correctly.

Play word games

A visualiser is ideal for displaying quiz questions, and then an answer sheet after a quiz, saving both time and paper. It can also be used for word games such as Scrabble tiles and/or Boggle cubes to challenge pupils to make words within a time limit.

Classroom management

Document cameras allow you to face the class while you are teaching rather than having to turn your back to write on a whiteboard. This helps keep the class engaged and participating, and any misunderstandings or raised hands can be spotted quickly.

Use the camera to display a list of rules, daily tasks, or topics of the day to the whole class without having to hand out individual sheets of paper.

And finally….

Remember that the HUE HD Pro also comes with its very own camera management software called HUE Intuition. You can capture snapshots through this premium software, record video, annotate images and flip your camera feed both vertically and horizontally.

A HUE HD Pro can transform teaching and learning in the classroom, inspiring and expanding horizons whilst brightening any literacy lesson.

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