Tips for Teaching Professors

Share this post

Tech Thursday: Use Text Capture Apps

higheredpraxis.substack.com

Discover more from Tips for Teaching Professors

Resources, teaching tips, best practices and professional development opportunities for faculty.
Over 2,000 subscribers
Continue reading
Sign in

Tech Thursday: Use Text Capture Apps

Apps that recognize text from a picture and convert it to text you can edit easily.

Breana Bayraktar
Mar 11, 2021
1
Share this post

Tech Thursday: Use Text Capture Apps

higheredpraxis.substack.com
Share

I love being able to step away from my computer and phone to read a real book. I’m a person who writes marginalia, underlines, uses sticky notes - reading becomes a very interactive experience. (Right now I’m reading Teaching What You Don’t Know, by Therese Huston). Often I want to save these notes for myself or use a quote from what I’m reading. In the past, I’ve used voice-to-text to read my notes or highlighted quotations from the text back to myself, but I have found a simpler and more accurate way to grab large chunks of text.

Photo-to-Text Apps

The basic idea is that you can use your phone to take a picture of a page out of a book, the app recognizes the printed text and saves the text only, which you can edit within the app, copy and paste into any other program, or send as a note to yourself. There are several different apps, all with very similar functionality, available for both Apple & Android devices. I tested multiple ones on a variety of documents before picking the best two.

BEST: Text Capture ($3.99/one time)

This app works easily and does a very good to excellent job recognizing a typewritten page and converting it to text you can edit in the app, copy/paste, save for later, or share immediately. After a brief free trial period, you do need to purchase the app to continue using it. I rarely pay for apps, but this one I purchased and have continued to use. Here’s what the app interface looks like in use:

I even tested handwriting just to see how accurately the app could capture it, even though all the apps say specifically that they do not work on handwriting. It did a decent job identifying hand-printed text when I was careful to write neatly.

ALTERNATE: Text Grabber ($1.99/month or $9.99/ year) works very much the same, but since it’s a more expensive subscription model without any additional functionality that I found useful, I can’t recommend choosing it over Text Capture.

I hope someone else finds this useful!

Request a future TIP topic!

Share Tips for Teaching Professors

Follow @breana

Past Tech Thursdays
  • Student engagement: Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback

  • Health: Two programs to reduce eyestrain

  • Zoom: Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom

  • Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles

  • Using images: Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots

  • Google Docs: “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document

  • Canvas: Canvas “What-if” grades

  • Productivity: Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration

1
Share this post

Tech Thursday: Use Text Capture Apps

higheredpraxis.substack.com
Share
Previous
Next
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Breana Bayraktar
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing