Making the Most of OCR Tools: A Guide for Students
OCR, or optical character recognition, is a useful technology for all kinds of people. It is widely used in offices and administrative sectors of organisations to convert physical documents into digital ones. Airports and government offices use them to verify documents like IDs and passports.
Today, though, we are going to look at how students can use this amazing technology to improve their studies.
How Can Students Use OCR?
The following are some tasks in which OCR technology can help students.
- Efficiently Take Notes
As a student, taking notes during lectures is a large part of the learning experience. The importance of taking notes increases with time as students move into higher grades.
Notes are important because they are the cornerstones of exam preparation and revision. So, taking efficient notes is extremely important. However, as the difficulty of the study material increases, it becomes harder to focus on taking notes and understanding the lecture.
Trying to do both can result in students failing at both tasks. Instead, what they can do is give their all to understand the lecture and take pictures of the lecture slides and complementary material written by the teacher.
Then, they can use OCR on those pictures to get the text in digital form and use it to create their notes once the lecture is over.
This can be done by running the picture through a photo to text converter online. The tool uses OCR to extract text from images and convert them into word-processor-compatible formats.
These digital notes are much easier to manage and store, and they can even be stored on the cloud to increase the number of places from which they can be accessed.
- Help Create Summaries of Long Texts
In higher education and above, the number of books one needs to study increases considerably. In addition, the content of such books also becomes more complex.
Reading them all is a considerably time-consuming task. Time that students often don’t have due to the plethora of assignments and tests.
The problem is compounded in college because professors will often give assignments that require reading research papers and journals.
To deal with all of that workload effectively, students can use PDF versions of the text and have them converted to doc, docx, or txt formats with OCR. OCR online tools can extract text from PDFs in the same way they can from images.
Then, the extracted text can be fed to a summarizer to get a shortened version. Students can read the summary to understand the content in a shorter amount of time, thereby becoming more efficient at studying.
- Enable Screen Readers to Work with Physical Documents
Another method of dealing with massive amounts of reading is to listen to the content during downtimes like commuting, eating, and resting. This is possible due to screen readers.
A screen reader is a software that can read the words on the screen and say them aloud. Students can use OCR to convert their books, notes, and papers into a compatible format that can be read with a screen reader.
This way, students can use screen readers to listen to their study materials and stay on top of their studies.
This is also a great way to help students who are visually impaired. They can use screen readers to access their study materials easily. Their fellow students can help them convert their books and notes into digital copies that can be read with screen readers.
- Can Help With Translations
This is a niche case, but students who are learning other languages can use OCR for their studies. They can use pictures of text in other languages and convert it to digital text with OCR. Then, students can translate that text into their native language.
In fact, there are plenty of OCR tools that already have this functionality. A notable example is Google Lens. Google Lens is a multi-faceted camera app that can identify objects and text inside pictures.
You can also point it at objects in real-time to see what it is, where you can buy them, etc. Of course, this functionality also extends to text. You can point your phone’s camera at any text while “Google Lens” is open, and it will translate it for you.
Conclusion
These are some ways in which students can make the most out of OCR tools. Technology is a great boon for education, and OCR can help in many ways.
