Google OCR Easily Convert Old Papers to Editable Docs
Why Google OCR? 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. This is why teachers store boxes and boxes of old worksheets and books. You never know when something is going to become the “new” trend in education, once again.
What if you want to edit or change those old documents? It would take too long to retype them. You can scan them, but they usually are converted to PDFs with images of your text. You cannot do anything with images of text. Besides, you are better off spending time working with students than in typing up lesson materials. Never fear! Google is here!
Google Drive offers simlple, easy, and free document conversion using built in OCR technology. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. The software recognizes the characters in an image file or scanned document. OCR is a technology that enables you to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into editable and searchable data. Very cool stuff!
The process is much easier than you would expect. Another nice innovation of Google. You simply upload a scan of the document or a pic of it taken with your phone. Then from Drive, select Open With and then Google Docs. The image will be converted automatically. The resulting Google Doc has the image on top and the text underneath. Check out this video to see an example.
