Digitizing handwritten work with mobile scanners

Despite the fact that digital technology has infiltrated most aspects of our lives, much of formal schooling is reliant on handwritten work. And this is not a bad thing, we should retain the frequent use of handwriting as a useful tool for recording information and expressing our thoughts. However, there are times when we need to digitize handwritten work for a variety of purposes, e.g. voice comments with Kaizena, and so here’re some useful mobile apps to scan on the move.

Android – Tiny Scan

I’m aware of other better known Android scanners like Camscanner but my students have been using TinyScan to good effect so if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me.

 

iOS – Scannable by Evernote

Scannable is by far the absolute best scanning app available on iOS. As you can see in the video below, it automatically detects your document when it’s placed on a plain background and scans it accordingly. It also adjusts the contrast such that the text is extremely clear. You can then save it in your evernote account or “send” it to other cloud storage apps like Dropbox or Google Drive. Ignore the additional ScanSnap device near the end of the video, your mobile app will suffice for most of your scanning needs.

 

If you guys have discovered any other useful mobile scanners do drop me a comment to let me know =).

3rd SWIFT conference

SWIFT here stands for schools with innovative future technology and this was inaugurated in 2011 at Hwa Chong Institution. It’s held every two years and the last conference was held in 2013 in New Zealand with Mission Heights Junior College. Note the difference in terminology. Junior college in NZ is equivalent to the secondary levels in Singapore. What we call Junior College (Pre-Uni level) is known as Senior College.

This year’s conference iteration was held in Diocesan’s Girls’ School in Hongkong and it was an eye opener for me. The participants of the conference include, in alphabetical order, Diocesan’s Girls’ School (HK), Hwa Chong Institution (SG), Mission Heights Junior College (NZ), Nanyang Girls’ High School (SG), School no. 19 (Tatarstan), St. Edmund’s College (AUS) and Waverly College (AUS). It was very fortunate that School no. 19 (pronounced School number one nine) joined us to bring us a non Asia-Pacific perspective. I was very impressed with their humility and determination to learn best practices and improve.

In this SWIFT conference iteration,there was definitely a convergence of ideas even if the various schools were at different stages of the ideas. The following are the convergent themes I’ve noticed.

Normalisation

The theme of normalisation. Almost all schools were mindful in their presentations to state that technology is merely a tool and must be led by pedagogy and learning outcomes. I guess too many declarations of “This tech is going to change everything” has got everyone wary about over-glorifying the power of technology. As mentioned by Stephen Bax,

The concept of the ‘normalisation’ of technology in language education was advanced some years ago (Bax, 2003) to refer to the stage when a pedagogical technology such as a textbook or pen has become in effect invisible, so seamlessly is it employed in our everyday practice in the service of language learning.

While Bax was talking about language learning, this concept of normalisation can certainly be applied to all forms of Edtech-assisted learning. The various presentations were focused on the pedagogical affordances of a certain type of edtech, for example how WIX websites were used for collaborative knowledge building. This was quite different from some of the other Edtech conferences I attended a few years back where it was about how many features a piece of technology had and why we should base all our lessons on the new piece of tech.

Well-being

There was an emphasis on well-being in various schools in various ways. All schools emphasize positive student-teacher relationships and values like gratitude and giving back to the community. This was embedded in their school values, school educational model or part of their curriculum. But School no. 19 had some unique ways of using technology to contribute to well-being. They utilised finger-print scanners for attendance and entry into the school campus and the presenter related 1 case where a student who stepped out of campus (using his thumb-print to open the side gate) received a call from his mother a few minutes later asking where he was going! This certainly kept the student in school and out of trouble. Another interesting anecdote was that the students used personalised cards (kind of like our EZ link in Singapore but each card is unique to a student) to pay for their food at the canteen. Which also meant that what they were eating was recorded. So if a student is obese and/or not doing well in Physical Education classes, the teacher can check his diet and make some recommendations like “you should eat less carbs” as what the Principal of School no. 19 said lol.

Professional development and collaboration

PE teacher explaining to students how to use the Coach My Video app to self-assess their running starts.

Students engaging in a lesson using the Nearpod app.

The App maker and product on an android tablet

Students learning how the basics of app design on MIT’s app maker.

All schools mentioned professional development as an important part of their strategy for excellence but in my opinion, DGS did a really good live demo of what it meant to be a school which cares about professional development. For the duration of the 3 day conference, Diocesan’s Girls’ School staff planned their lesson schedule such that teachers had no lessons and could attend the conference as part of their professional development training. Furthermore they arranged for demo ict integrated lessons on the 3rd day of the conference and there were multiple benefits to DGS staff.

The teachers doing the demo lessons had to really know their stuff. Furthermore, when their lessons were completed and we went to ask them questions, the professional pride was evidently seen and felt. This will certainly help in sustaining the motivation to improve their craft, whether by leveraging tech or otherwise. Teachers who were not involved in the demo were also able to check out what their colleagues from other subjects were doing. This helps in their understanding of each others work and they would also know who to turn to for a particular type of technology/pedagogy. It was certainly a masterful stroke by DGS management to combine the conference with professional development of their staff.

In terms of collaboration, on the first day of the conference, Prof. Nancy Law used the analagy of SARS (which she admitted was kind of an awkward analogy) about how to let good ideas die. Isolation or quarantine was the method in which most governments used to contain the SARS virus. Similarly, if a teacher has good ideas but nobody to back him/her up or to bounce ideas with, that teacher will eventually give up due to isolation. As such, collaboration is the key to innovation and improvement. Incidentally this was corroborated quantitatively by John Hattie as well. Collaboration was emphasized by both the principal of DGS, Mrs Stella Lau and Waverly High’s Mr Westley at the closing of the conference. They mentioned that the greatest value of the conference would be the relationships and potential collaborative opportunities between schools and teachers. So I leave you with the following photo I saw on the ultimate strength page. Don’t be a lone wolf my friends, instead by part of a pride of lions!

Testing out the Moleskin-Evernote handwriting recognition feature

I finally managed to get my hand on a moleskin notebook which is supposed to improve the handwriting recognition within the Evernote app. It’s actually quite simple.

Open the evernote app ==> Create a new note ==> use the camera feature, use the “document setting” and snap a photo of the moleskin notebook page and voila, digitised notes.

As far as I can tell, the difference between the document and photo setting is the length and breadth of the photo frame and that the document setting will have the flash constantly turned on. This presumably makes for better contrast between the writing and the background for more reliable handwriting recognition

I was skeptical initially but the feature does seem to be able to tolerate a certain amount of cursive handwriting as can be seen from my handwritten “testing”. The word “evernote” seems to be too messy to be recognised, I will just have to adjust a bit. But at least I won’t have to write super deliberately and neatly for the handwriting recognition to work. 

It’s really a smart move on Evernote’s part to embrace the analog world instead of going up against it. Writing on paper is such a primal thing to many people that it is not likely to go away anytime soon. There’s an additional feature – post it stickers serving some sort of tagging function. Should be quite interesting when I have that figured out!

Q&A tools for lecturers and the mindset behind the tools

The tool: Pigeonhole Live – The Mindset: Sage on the stage

One of the main issues with lectures is that the interaction between the lecturer and the audience is rather limited. The verbal Q&A between the audience and the lecturer is one method of increasing the interaction but it is often time consuming and the question quality varies.

In comes technology to the rescue! Pigeonhole Live is a platform that allows the audience to post questions and the cool part is that other audience members get to vote up the question which they deem worthy of the lecturer’s time to answer. This was developed by a group of clever NUS students who were frustrated with the traditional Q&A seen in lectures. You can take a look at the video below to find out more. 

Pigeonhole Live is suited for a Sage on the Stage mindset where the lecturer is the main source of knowledge. This could be due to the lecturer’s preeminent position in the field or when the audience is made up of people with limited exposure to said field.

The tool: Twitter – The Mindset: Guide on the Side   

If, however, the audience comprises practitioners of the field who are experts in their own right, then perhaps a better tool would be twitter. I myself encountered twitter in a formal setting in the 2012 International Conference for Learning and Teaching with Technology (ICTLT). The participants of the conferences were all practising educators. Throughout the keynote and various concurrent sessions, participants were tweeting their thoughts and engaging with each other via twitter hashtags, e.g. #ICTLT2012. There were moments when the speaker would stop and attempt to answer questions that have been posted on twitter (the twitter conversations was projected onto a screen) but it was pretty much a random process and the question quality varied. In this case however, it mattered less because other participants may tweet an answer to the question or they may even contact each other via twitter to meet up and carry on the conversation face-to-face. Thus the speaker is in a sense a Guide on the Side, with his/her lecture content serving to stimulate ideas and conversation between participants rather than to impart knowledge. Given the public nature of twitter, the conversation may carry on after the talk via the hashtags. This helps sustain the inspiration/energy from the talk for a few more days, maximizing the positive impact to the participants. Some speakers join in the conversation as well, serving the role as Guide on the Side again even after his/her talk is over.

Later on I learnt that the role twitter was playing in the conference was called a “backchannel“. The benefit is, of course, the increased interaction among audience members but there are concerns that it may prove to be a distraction. The counter-argument to that is that audience members are increasingly being distracted by their mobile devices anyway so twitter is a way of stealing some of that attention back.

Conclusion

I hope I have given you enough information about these two tools for you to make a decision regarding their usage. At the end of the day, this simple principle should always hold true – Choose the Technology that fits your Pedagogy.