30 in 30: Day 27 - Images to Text with Optical Character Recognition in Google Docs

Day 27 in the 30 in 30 series is going to BLOW YOUR MIND.  Google has the ability to convert an image into text via a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature.  This is extremely powerful for those old documents that are sitting in an actual file cabinet somewhere that haven't been converted to digital yet.  All you need to do is take a picture of whatever document that you have, upload it to Google Drive (lots of ways of getting it there, but the easiest way is probably the Google Drive app for your mobile device (click here for iPhone ~~~ click here for Android)) and then choose the Open with --> option in Drive.  Google does it's thing in the background and after a few seconds, will open a Google Document with an image converted to text.  After a little bit of editing, you have a digital document that is ready to be shared via Google Classroom (or whatever your preferred LMS) and delivered to students.  If you are looking to see this in action, click here to watch the tutorial video.

On a side note, the orientation that you take the picture will be important.  If it is sideways in drive, the text will show up as a scrambled mess.  If that is the case, turn your phone the other direction and take the picture again.  I've found more success by holding my phone (iPhone running iOS) sideways rather than up and down.