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Use your mouse to pan around the Media Creation Lab’s lightboard set up.

Lightboard

Lightboard is a glass chalkboard pumped full of light. It’s for recording video lecture topics. You face toward your viewers, and your writing glows in front of you.

– Professor Michael Peshkin, Northwestern University, Lightboard inventor

What does the lightboard allow me to do in my educational videos?

  • Write on the board without blocking your writing with your body
  • Face your audience while writing on the board, so students can see your expressions or even read your lips
  • Combine hand-written notes and drawings with video of you making and explaining them
  • Annotate a digital image
  • Avoid time-intensive and complicated video editing or animation techniques that would let you do the above without a lightboard

What are some things Pitt faculty have done with the lightboard so far?

  • Created worked solutions to electrical engineering quizzes
  • Showed nursing students how to take a family history and make it into a pedigree
  • Lectured about the crucifixion
  • Flipped a semester-long calculus class
  • Diagrammed logic gates
  • Modeled how to use a T-table in biostatistics

Video Examples:

Do I have to learn how to write backwards?

  • No! The camera films you through the board, and the footage is mirrored digitally in real time by the computer software processing the recording.

I teach at Pitt – how can I use the lightboard?

Our lightboard is within the Media Creation Lab in Alumni Hall, which is available for use by Pitt instructors.

What do Pitt faculty say about their experiences using the lightboard?

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