Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Online OCR is a brilliant online tool that recognizes text in images or PDFs.  In seconds it converts the text into a word processor document that allows you to edit and format the text.  Magic!  If you've ever had a PDF or a hard copy of a document that you wanted to edit, Online OCR is your new best friend.   OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.   Online OCR allows you to upload an image file or a PDF.  You then decide what kind of output file you want to generate.  Typically one would choose Microsoft Word.  Even if you don't have Microsoft Word on your machine, you can easily upload a Word file to Google Drive, which converts it to an editable Google Doc.   Online OCR even works with other languages.  If you are uploading an image or PDF that contains a foreign language, you can instruct it to maintain that language when converting to text.  (In the video below, I misinterpreted the language feature and...

CocoMaterial is a website that offers thousands of copyright-free, hand-drawn illustrations.  If you are looking to place an image into a document or slide, CocoMaterial is a one-stop shop that provides high-quality clipart illustrations that are simple and easy on the eye.  I hate sifting through millions of blurry or overly complicated images in Google when all I want is a simple graphic that looks good on my document or presentation.  If you agree that simple is better, then CocoMaterial is a great place to look for images. You can customize the images in CocoMaterial before downloading them.  You can change the stroke (outline) color, and you can fill the image with a chosen color.  By default the images are black-and-white illustrations with black outlines.   When you download an image, CocoMaterial provides you with a compressed zip file that contains both a PNG file as well as an SVG file.  You will probably never use the SVG file; thes...

I attended the Canva information session at last Friday's PD morning, and my mind was blown!  Dan Niessen from NEONet presented a taste of what can be created in Canva.  The sky is the limit!  Canva is an online platform for creating just about any kind of graphic.  It creates stunning presentations, infographics, videos, whiteboards, websites, and on and on.  If you haven't tried Canva, I highly recommend you check it out.  I love how easy and intuitive it is.  Because our school district has been verified by Canva, staff and students all have free access to all of Canva's premium features. To get started, visit Canva's education website:  https://www.canva.com/education .  If it's your first time using Canva, select the Teachers button and Get verified .  From that point you simply sign in with Google. Canva offers a design school with heaps of amazing tutorials for teachers.  It is very user-friendly.  You'd be impressed b...

It's happened to all of us.  You discover a web page that you want to share with your students.  It contains great information.  But it is chock full of advertisements and other distracting elements.  Print Friendly is a resource that can clear all the garbage out of that web page so you can then print a clean copy of it.  Print Friendly also allows you to save a clean PDF version of the web page that can be distributed to your students electronically.   Print Friendly is a web page with a simple interface.  You simply paste the URL of the web page you want to clean up.  Print Friendly does its magic and produces a simplified version of the web page that can then be printed or saved as a PDF.  Easy peasy. If you are using the Chrome browser on a PC or Mac, you can install the Print Friendly extension .  With the extension you can access Print Friendly with the click of a mouse, rather than navigating to the website.   Try...

Happy Tuesday! After recovering from spine surgery, I'm back with another tech tidbit. Google Workspace recently added a feature to Google Docs that allows users to add drop-down menus to their documents. Drop-down menus are a useful way to keep track of lists.  Let's say, for example, that you are keeping track of your students' progress on a class project.  In a Google Doc, you can generate a list of students.  Next to each name you can insert a drop-down menu that includes a status (progressing, complete, etc.).  As your students progress through the project, you can update the status next to their name on the document. Google includes a couple of pre-selectable drop-down menus.  But of course you can customize your own menus as well.  You can find the drop-down function under the Insert menu.  Or you can prompt one by typing @dropdown in your document.  Drop-down menus only work on the full browser version of Google Docs.  If you try to u...