Here at Teq we’ve used a lot of Microsoft applications. That in and of itself isn’t surprising–Microsoft Word and Powerpoint are two of the most popular and enduring pieces of software in the American classroom, and OneDrive is one of the better examples of seamless cloud-based storage available. As an educator, I’ve found myself returning the Microsoft Office suite again and again to write lesson plans, create presentations, and help students craft their own projects—we even have a full certification series on Microsoft available on our Online PD platform.
What does surprise, however, is how Office always seems to be adding more and more features right under the rest of the industry’s nose. In the last year, Microsoft has added two more presentation tools in Sway and Mix, and streamlined many of their older platforms to work better with each other. However, the biggest surprise of the last year is Office Lens—a little-talked-about but incredibly useful mobile scanner app.

Using Office Lens, you can take photos of photos, documents, or even whiteboards to convert into documents. The app can create PDFs, Word, and Powerpoint documents out of the images you take, then send them to OneDrive or OneNote for immediate storage. The next time you log onto OneDrive or OneNote from any device, there your documents are, ready and available to use and edit all you want.

The app is wonderfully clean—when taking photos of any number of documents, the scanner takes the angle of your camera into account and will trim the image to match it, resulting in a straight document each time. The automatic conversion process cleans up any outside residue, trimming so that your scan includes your document and only your document. If the trimming process is not perfect, you can also customize the crop applied so that you have all the parts of the image you need.

For teachers, it’s a quick and efficient way to convert physical resources into digital ones. Since Office Lens is tied directly to the rest of Microsoft Office, an educator can take a photo of a worksheet, send it directly to another platform, and share it digitally with their students.

For students, it’s a great way to enhance their own digital material—and their memories—using their smartphone. For example, students can snap photos of their homework assignment on a whiteboard, then send it to OneNote to annotate along with their notes. As long as they have their phones on them, students will always have an easy supplement for their own minds…not to mention one less way to forget an assignment.
If you or your school uses Microsoft Office extensively, there’s no reason for you not to try out Lens. If you’re looking to make the move to take your physical documents into the digital world, you have even more incentive!  Office Lens was initially only available for Windows devices, but has been made available for Android and iOS devices as of April 2015. For all three platforms, it’s a free app–no purchase required.

If ten months seems like surprisingly long time before we mentioned it here at Teq, I agree–it’s taken even us by surprise. For such a quiet little app, there’s so much potential for teachers to take advantage of!