Flipping Over This Camera

This past fall my son, then a college student in NH, was contacted by a TV news program with a nice deal: go to see presidential candidates and film them and the news program would supply a free video camera that he could keep. What college student wouldn't take that deal? So for the price of admission to one event, he got a cool little Flip video camera.

I dusted around the camera once in a while but never really looked at it until I needed to film something. I borrowed his camera and, voila, a whole new world of video filming, editing, and publishing came alive in my hands, all contained in a device not much larger than a deck of cards.

The model of FlipCam I used stores up to an hour of video. When you get done recording, you take it to your computer and pull a little lever on it that "flips" out a USB connector, which you plug into your computer. Upon doing so, my computer prompted me to install the software that transfers the video from camera to computer, which installed easily and quickly. Then, literally, with a single click I downloaded all the video from the camera and began picking and choosing scenes.

A cool feature of the software is that you can pick any frame in your video and make it a still image (jpg). When graduation day came along, we took the video camera, even though we only wanted stills. That way, if your subject blinks or moves, you have the previous and next frames to choose from, which, with my amateur photography skills, significantly raises the success rate.

In just a few minutes, I learned to love this little camera. This summer when we hosted the 25th Annual Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science and Technology, one of our presenters forgot his video camera, so I just loaned him the FlipCam for the week. No training, no handholding. It just worked. He paid me back in new batteries.

This summer I've been thinking a little about how one could use this type of camera in the classroom. Certainly, it would be great for recording skits or for students to prepare video for a project. I bet there are a million other uses. It's not a lot different than using your cell phone camera, but, for my carrier at least, it is much easier to access and work with the recorded video.

The only problem with this sweet little portable device is that it is so easy to take anywhere that my son has taken it with him to grad school, so now I think I'm going to have to go buy one myself. The company even lets you buy a branded one that supports a good cause. Now I just have to figure out how to choose among them.