I bought the EyeClops video microscope last week and it arrived yesterday. I took it to school and my students had it up and running in no time. I was interested to see the quality of the images and video and to see if this would be something I could use in the classroom. The first thing to do is insert 5 AA batteries. It comes with a USB flash drive that records the media. I also tried a 2 gigabyte flash drive and it worked nicely. During the day I learned to move from pictures to video and how to focus. There are three magnifications: 100x 200x, and 400x. It’s difficult to focus when using the 400x but I learned to hold it down and go from lower power to higher.
The flash drive will only hold a few megabytes of data so have another flash drive handy. Here area few pictures I took today, my first day with the EyeClops. I hope to explore more this week and have an updated post by this weekend.
Here is a piece of bread at 100x. All of these pictures were imported into iPhoto and given a quick edit using the enhance magic wand.
The second picture is an onion skin at 200x.
The third picture is the same onion skin at 100x. The fourth picture is a closeup of a pineapple at 100x. The last is a small video of a state map.
After I took these pictures, it was easy to hook the EyeClops into the VCR using the S-video and project it onto the Smartboard for the whole class to see. I bought mine for $24.99 at Amazon and it is worth the price, even if you just play around with it. We had a fun day in science class today.
