Scanning on the Ipad

I am teaching a course called Digital Media and Methods, a foundation course encompassing the digital technology utilized in the design field.  The lesson this week was Capture and Production (essentially how you convert an object with physical dimensions to digital dimensions so it can be used in a design product [ie website, brochure, etc.]) The technology in our computer labs is pretty extensive scanners, projector, computers, cameras—so I didn't need to use the ipad for this lesson. But I wanted to try to incorporate its use in the classroom.

Two devices used to "capture" are digital cameras and scanners. Turns out, the ipad has the capacity to take pretty good pictures using the built-in camera.  And most of the free scanning apps I found allow you to scan in documents as a jpg or pdf that can be emailed or uploaded to cloud storage (drop box, icloud etc.) This is useful, however, the file formats created are images not editable text. To be fair, a flatbed scanner does the same thing. 

However, there are apps that can convert images to editable text. I found a free one called Image to Text OCR which creates editable text from images. Once scanned and emailed it, you receive the image and a text file with the editable text extracted from the image.  Pretty useful…maybe not for this lesson, but I have a lot of hard copy notes that I want to convert to and editable digital form for use in my lectures. This app may help me attain that goal.