I teach illiterates and having an instant camera at my disposal is really a great help particularly now that I (finally!) have an interactive whiteboard at my disposal. Instead of complicated explanations delivered Marcel Marceau style I can just show.
In this case it wasn’t to explain the word but rather letting a student know that he had left his personal punch in the classroom and that I would keep it safe for him.
BTW, because I have been asked before: Internet translators don’t work very well with non-European languages. The translations are often bad or funny and worse, confusing. Better than nothing, occasionally, mainly if used like an old-fashioned dictionary for single words only. This works best for the major languages, like Arabic or Turkish, because there is the possibility to sound the translation. Languages like Somali and even Farsi only offer written translations which are of no use to somebody who cannot write that language either.
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pictures imperfect blog 
I’ve never had a lesson from a white-board – yet. Showing my age here.
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Just imagine your phone in xxxxxlarge. You can use any internet based app on it. It has sound, too. I have a program where it shows the book we are using. At the same time you can write on the board on top of the pictures shown (i.e. I can fill in an exercise in large so the students can compare it directly with what they have written in their books on their desks). Or, using it as a blank white board, similar to a painting app. It’s fun to write something electronically (with a pencil but I can use my fingertip as well) and wiping it off with my hand or a cloth. Those are the basic functions and the best is: they are basically self-explanatory. Very user-friendly.
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It does sound a great addition to the classroom.
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It’s an enormous help and time saver as well.
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I can see how language translation can be a difficult task for a computer technology.
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No doubt it is. And I am amazed how good it can be – within the West European languages. For more “exotic” languages it is different. It can actually be quite fun to try this out by playing “Chinese whispers”, letting a sentence be translated from one language into another returning to English. The problem comes when people rely on this tool and accept the translations as good and true. In some respects it is worse if the translation is pretty good. BS is detected by most people.
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I haven’t had much experience with translators, but when the airline lost our luggage on our way to Brazil, the tool was invaluable in helping us work through our issue with the baggage agent who didn’t speak English at all. Of course, Portuguese is a western language, so the translation was pretty accurate for us.
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