The cost of an opaque projector from Highsmith is $1570, including shipping and <a target="new" href="http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm" onclick="g_openWindow('http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm', 300, 800, 'fulfillwindow');return false;">fulfillment</a>.
I have a wonderful group of fifth-graders in my inner-city San Francisco classroom. As a school, we are concentrating on taking students through the writing process: prewriting/organizing, rough draft, revising, editing and publishing. For some reason, (and believe me - I am not complaining), my students are really into writing this year.
At the moment we have almost finished working our way through ?Persuasive Essay? and my students' pleas to stop wearing uniforms, to have more recess, to be served better lunches in school and to be given puppies at home, are ALL well thought out and well written. This really impressed me since I have quite a variety of learning styles in my classroom.
The one tool that I think was most effective in their learning was sharing their work in progress, and using it as exemplars to model each step of the writing process. Normally children this age are quite reserved, and are cautious about sharing their work for fear of being criticized. My students however, are eager to have their work critiqued, because they not only know that they can learn from their mistakes, but bask in the glory of their successes. Every single student in my class offers their work without hesitation and as a result their learning has increased by leaps and bounds.
For this process to work, it has to be immediate and automatic. I can have overhead transparencies made of their writing, but I wouldn't get them back from the office until the next day ? or maybe later.
I would love to have an opaque projector to make it easier for my students to share their writing samples with the class. With an opaque projector, the students could project their original work onto the whiteboard without having to make a transparency first. It wouldn't just be for writing, either. I could use for other subjects as well as a way to share any opaque material with the kids: photographs, newspaper articles, small posters, heck - even their text books. I know this would boost their interest and have an automatic, positive impact on my students.
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