Easily Convert Old Tests and Documents to Editable Google Docs
Teachers are really good at storing old documents and files. As quickly as things fluctuate in education, you may find yourself teaching one way this year, a different way next year, and then going back to the original way the next. Anyone who teaches K-2 can attest to this with phonics v. whole language methods.
What if you want to edit or change those old documents? It would take too long to retype them. Besides, you are better off spending time working with students than in typing up lesson materials. Never fear! Editable Google Docs are here!
Google Drive offers simlple, easy, and free document conversion using built in OCR* technology. Simply upload a scan of the document or a pic of it taken with your phone. Then from Google Drive**, select Open With and then Google Docs. The image will be converted automatically. The resulting Editable Google Docs have the image on top and the text underneath. Check out this video to see an example.
*Optical character recognition(optical character reader) (OCR) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data records, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation. It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that it can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as machine translation, text-to-speech, key data and text mining.~from Wikipedia
**Using OCR in Google Drive
In Google Drive, we take your uploaded images or PDF files, scan the file, and use computer algorithms to convert the file into a Google document.
For best results, the image or PDF files need to meet certain requirements:
- Resolution: High-resolution files work best. As a rule of thumb, we recommend each line of text in the documents to be of at least 10 pixels height.
- Orientation: Only documents oriented with the correct side up are recognized. If you’ve accidentally scanned or captured a document in a different orientation, please use a program to retouch and edit images to rotate them before uploading to Google Drive.
- Languages, fonts and character sets: Our OCR engine supports a large variety of character sets and will detect the language of the document automatically. We recognize left-to-right and right-to-left languages, as well as text written vertically for languages where this is common (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). You’ll get better results if your image includes common fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman.
- Image quality: Sharp images with even lighting and clear contrasts will work best. Motion blur or bad camera focus will decrease the quality of the detected text.
From Google Support. Click HERE for more.
