This week my Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter was about tools for digitizing physical notes. There are tools like CamScanner and Office Lens specifically made for that task. There are also tools that have the “hidden” capability to digitize physical notes. One of those tools is Google Drive.

When you snap a picture and upload it to Google Drive you can then have it converted into a Google Document that you can edit and share just like any other Google Doc. In the following video I demonstrate how easy it is to use Google Drive to convert physical notes into Google Docs.

Applications for Education
Many teachers, including me, still like to have students write at least some of their notes in physical notebooks. The trouble is that some students are prone to losing those physical notes. Having students snap a picture and save it to Google Drive is one way to preserve those physical notes.

Ease of sharing notes with you is another benefit of snapping a picture of physical notes and converting them into Google Docs. If you like to do periodic “notebook checks,” taking pictures of notebook pages and uploading them to Google Drive is a good alternative to collecting physical notebooks.