VuPoint Magic Wand
There are times when a single-use item is best, and wrapping it up in other products is a bad idea. For example, take the scanner. Time was there used to be a variety of flat-bed scanners out there, and while they were hard to use, they performed an important task: to change paper hard copies into digital ones. Sadly, the humble scanner was a clunky thing and took up a lot of desk space. Now scanners are more often seen attached to all-in-one inkjet printers as an afterthought since most consumers no longer use them for scanning in photos and don’t bother scanning in documents.
As a teacher, I love scanners. I love to get my student’s work on a computer either to make a record of it, pass it on to a colleague or parent, or to pop it up on my SmartBoard. Part of my teaching routine is to go to the staff room and wrangle with the massive copier’s scanner function in order to make a PDF ‘overhead’ I can actually use since most of my teacher materials still come in the form of a bound, blackline master books. Sure, there are overhead options—for example, document cameras such as the ELMO—but they tend to be expensive, take up valuable desk space, and lack the ability to digitally share the document or mark it up.
Enter my newest toy and salvation: the VuPoint ‘Magic Wand’ scanner. It’s a foot-long rod that runs on two AA batteries and allows me to scan documents by simply passing it over a page. No clunky flat-bed, no waiting for it to ‘warm up’ or messing around with software, just pass it over your document and the image is popped onto a microSD card. I see myself spending a day before school starts scanning through all my textbooks and overheads so that they will be ready for my SmartBoard. I see myself passing this around to students so that they can share their work either on my whiteboard or via my online classroom. I finally have an easy, child-proof method of converting written work to digital work.