Cheap "Doc Cam" Stand

I work with some very talented people but I have to credit my coworkers brother for this one! PVC pipe doc cam stand. You simply lay your ipad on the stand and work underneath it. The iPads camera app will zoom for you and you can even record it for those kiddos who missed!

To make this you need glue and a PVC pipe. The cost for materials was around $7.00. The cheapest I could find online was $80!

                                                    

Do you have any cheap tech tips? I would love to hear them and I will keep sharing mine as I find them! I hope you found these last three posts helpful! 

Cheap Sound Booth

Here is another cheap high tech idea! Sound booths made out of boxes and mattress foam. I love having my kids create videos to show their learning but when 30 kids are recording it gets noisy so our Apple Education Rep gave me the idea to create sound boxes. My initial idea was a large box you could stand in. It seemed like it would be hard to store in my already crowded tiny classroom. So I made smaller sound boxes for a really reasonable price!

You will need boxes big enough to have the iPad stand in (I had several sturdy moving boxes given to me.) packing tape, hot glue and mattress foam or sound panels (I also had several of these given to me.) I found brand new mattress foam at Goodwill (They have so much new stuff donated from Target!!!!)

Tape the box together and then measure out your foam sides. Hot glue those in and you are in sound booth business! I added some contact paper I already had to a couple of them. I made eight sound booths with the out of pocket cost to me being $18.99.

Your students just lean in to record their sound. It is crazy how much sound these drown out! 

Cheap Green Screen

This year I am all about high tech lessons on a tiny budget. One of these is my cheap green screen and the fun we have had with it.  I grabbed some bright green fabric from Hobby Lobby and used the 40% off coupon for extra savings. It cost around $20 for five yards.  I have had my students use it a couple of times so far this year. Once for Halloween when they laid on it so they could do any pose and once for our holiday open house. For the second project they used props and made winter scenes.


We are an iPad school so we used instant alpha in keynote to create our pictures. Here is the how to video I made for the open house.

Here is my own green screen pictures! 

By using a native app to create the photos and cheap fabric you have a green screen for around $20 (minus the cost of the iPads HA!) If you want something even cheaper you can do instant alpha on a blank wall or butcher paper.