The Flip Camera, made by Pure Digital Technologies, is a small inexpensive camcorder that easily slips into a shirt pocket or even a clutch purse. What’s more, the Flip does one thing and one thing well: it allows you to video record whatever you want with little fuss. You don’t have a gadget with a lot of features — instead the point-and-shoot camera is designed to facilitate video recording and make us all into videographers.

Pure Digital’s Flip, in addition to being used by parents to record their children’s activities and forever being able to relive these memories, is also used by students to create video essays. Five students, for example, did a video montage using a Flip Camera during a travel grant to Africa. The students took video field notes to document the food cycle in destinations in rural communities of Africa and South Africa. They set up a website for each of the students to share their video information. One student then edited and organized the clips to create a video documentary of their findings.
How Does the Flip Camera Work?
The Flip by Pure Digital, Inc. is completely automatic. You don’t have to change manual settings. It’s just point and shoot. Recording video is as simple as aiming the lens and microphone toward a subject and pressing the record button. Video is captured on a flash drive, and the unit has a 1.5-inch LCD screen to watch playback of the video. When you want to download the video on-line, a spring-loaded USB plug on the device allows it to attach directly to a computer for file transfers. Built-in software enables video transfer for processing, storage, or sharing on sites like YouTube and Facebook. For about the price of a low-end digital camera, the Flip produces up to an hour of video.

Flip Cameras Used for Educational Purposes