My New Nerdy Purchase

I'm very excited to have purchased a refurbished digital projector for my classroom. It's a Nextar XPJ darkroom projector, and I got it for only $100! One thing I really dislike about my class meeting space is the reliance on chart paper. Chart paper is great for modeling, and for having a shared text, but managing all of the different papers is a real pain. I constantly run out of paper. It takes FOREVER to write out a whole poem. It's just one of those little things that for reasons unknown, it bugs the snot out of me. Enter the digital projector. My goal is to replace my chart paper easel with a 4' x 5' dry erase board, mounted landscape. Then the projector will project onto the dry erase board, creating a digital chart paper.

In years past, it has become a regular practice to photograph chart paper writing as well as any class writing or brainstorming on the chalkboard. It makes it very easy to bring the text back up without having to physically save it. For example, rather than having to flip through a bunch of chart papers to find a shared poem, I can simply bring up the digital picture and voilà: we are good to go.

While my classroom is equipped with a very nice digital projector, it is permanently mounted in a part of the room where I don't need it. Hopefully the Nextar will be able to fill that need. The quality of the Nextar isn't very good, and it is a darkroom projector, meaning it projects using a standard overhead projector bulb, which is both good and bad. It's good as replacing the bulb costs $12, compared to most projectors bulbs costing over $300. It's bad since the projector only outputs 300 lumens, compared to the Epson projector mounted in my classroom rated at 2000 lumens. This means the projector literally needs to be used in a dark room. So we'll see how that works out.