A new app allows teachers to use their iPhone or iPad as an aerial camera in Zoom

Teachers who have found themselves teaching during Zoom have probably already discovered clever tricks for showing documents to students, but now there is an application designed specifically for that purpose (via 9to5Mac) The Overviewer was made by developer Charlie Chapman and allows teachers (or anyone, really) to easily use their phone’s camera as a replacement for a suspended document viewer.

If it’s been a minute since you were a student, or if your school didn’t have these suspended devices, they’re basically webcams pointing straight down that allow teachers to show students a printed document, book, hand drawing or other piece of writing or image. It is a useful skill to have, but many teachers are working from home because of COVID and may not have access to one as they would in the classroom.

The Overviewer works as a replacement, taking advantage of Zoom’s built-in screen sharing feature that works with the iPhone when connected to a computer with a Lightning cable, or wirelessly via AirPlay (at the moment, Zoom doesn’t seem to offer this feature for Android users). It shows a feed from your phone’s camera on the screen, with nothing more disturbing. The feature also offers the ability to turn on your phone’s flashlight if its lighting is not optimal, as well as the option to change the camera being displayed.

In a poignant blog post about how he developed the app for his wife, who works as a kindergarten teacher, Chapman explains how he saw his wife using the integrated iOS camera app to do the same thing and how frustrated she was with the lack of landscape support and all overlapping buttons on the screen:

Being the stupid husband that I am, I quickly developed an app that does nothing but show what the phone’s camera sees with zero chrome and rotates the entire app accordingly so you can share it in zoomed landscape mode. It worked and she really used it!

It is well tailored exactly for my wife’s use case, but I think it would be very common for teachers to be in our current virtual teaching world now.

If you are a teacher or are thinking of some other use for the app, it is available for free on the App Store. It is important to note that if you are using a Mac, Zoom will ask for permission to record your screen and will have to be restarted to share your phone’s screen (this is because Zoom is just displaying your phone’s screen on your computer, and then capture that window).

For more information on how the app works, the developer has made an instructional video, which you can watch below.