Q&A: Zooming in on a page when presenting
Question: When I am presenting information from a website to my students I often have to write down the web address of the page that I’m going to in Word so that I can enlarge it on my screen for the students to see. If I just go to the webpage, the address is so small that students generally can’t see it. Do you have any ideas on how to address this?
Answer: One of our instructors, Sue Wright, recently showed us a new tool that she uses in her classroom and in our Ed Tech classes. It is called ZoomIt and it is free to download and use. I had the opportunity to use the tool while teaching in Plymouth, England this summer and found it very useful. It remedies the issue of not being able to see the web address by allowing the presenter to zoom in to that particular part of the page.
In addition, it allows you to draw on the page to highlight a particular area that you want your students to view. The pen width and color is customizable and can be used with or without the Zoom feature.
Lastly, it includes a Break Timer that will blank out your screen. So if you are doing a presentation and part way through you want the students to get into groups or take a break you can set the timer for the appropriate number of minutes and have that displayed on your screen.
After downloading the program, it is important to read the ZoomIt options screen to learn how to utilize the program. It runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys. Once you set these hotkeys it is very easy to zoom in to any area on the screen.
The program is currently only available for Windows. Both Mac and Windows operating systems have a built in function that you can use but this 3rd party application adds a bit more functionality and is easier to use.
You can learn more about the program as well as download it from the publisher’s website at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx. Please note that doing a search in Google for Zoom It may pull up applications/scripts that are different from this particular one, so read carefully before downloading.