What if there was an app that your students could use to take a photo of anything you write on a whiteboard, store it, convert it to text, and make it easy for them to search back to find a specific word you’d written on the whiteboard last term? And thus mean that you could deliver lessons/lectures using a mix of whiteboard and PowerPoint, without putting students at a disadvantage when they need to find the brilliant example you drew up on the whiteboard? Well, yep, there’s some help!
Capture lesson/lecture notes with OneNote
Here’s an example from a meeting earlier today – the image on the left was the original that I took with the camera – and on the right is the version that I took with OneNote from exactly the same position – it automatically cropped it, straightened it, and worked out which bit of the image was the whiteboard!
So here’s more of the detail:
Last month we announced a series of enhancements to the OneNote app for Windows 8, including making it much easier to share information with OneNote from other Windows 8 apps (using the Windows Share Charm). But the feature that I think might be most helpful for teachers, lecturers and students, is the ability to take shots of whiteboards and documents, and import them into OneNote automatically cropped, straightened and sharpened.
The Camera Scan features allows you to capture documents, magazines and whiteboards easily into OneNote. It will automatically crop, rotate, straighten, remove shadows and sharpen the image so it looks like a scanned document. This makes it easy to capture, read, and re-use sets of notes from other sources – for example, to quickly capture a set of lecturer’s notes from a whiteboard. To use Camera Scan, you simply select the camera in the OneNote radial menu and snap away.
You can see it working in the video below.
Once you've got the image in, OneNote also scans all of the text in the image and converts it via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to full text. That means you can then search on text in the image and even copy text from the image, for use in another document!
The video below shows how this works in practice, with a scan of a shop receipt:
Learn more about the recent updates to the Windows 8 OneNote app
Or, download the free Windows 8 OneNote app and try it out yourself