Have you ever taken a picture of the board at the front of your ESL classroom? It’s actually a pretty good way to capture lots of notes in a hurry, but you won’t be able to edit those notes once the picture is snapped.
Some document scanners have built in text recognition, but it can take a while for the scanner bar to drag across the document. Sure, it’s only a matter of seconds, but if you have a big stack of documents to put through the scanner one page at a time, it can be a real inconvenience. In fact, this scanner bar technology (a one-dimensional sensor being dragged across a two-dimensional surface) seems just a bit out of date, doesn’t it?
Enter a new line of scanners described in Popular Science that incorporate digital camera sensors to capture an entire document at one time — no more waiting for the sensor to drag.
But wouldn’t it be nice to snap a picture instead of scanning a document? Well, it turns out there is an app for that. Scanner Pro (reviewed by cnet) turns your iPhone into a .pdf-producing document scanner. Forget trying to find a fax machine when you need to sign a document and send it to someone. Sign a document, then scan it and email it, all from your phone. There are other apps available for iPhones and iPods beginning at $0.99 and likely similar options for other flavors of smartphone as well. The future is here today!
Thanks to the OSU Yammer community for ideas and links used in this post.
ESL Technology.com 