A free scanner in your pocket

Free scanner!  And it fits in your pocket.

Leah Glashow-Mandel found this great resource, called Camscanner, an app which essentially turns your smartphone into a scanner.  

Just download Camscanner, and you can take pictures of student work -- posters, papers, etc:

(Here's one Summer McCall took to use as a model for her other classes)

(Here's a poster from one of Leah's sessions)

 -- or even your chalkboard:

(Okay, your chalkboard doesn't look quite like that...)

(But maybe it looks like this...)

And then turn them into a JPG, or a PDF -- to email, post to your website, embed in a presentation.

There's a free version (which I use) and a paid app which has a few more bells and whistles.

Camscanner has a nice feature which helps compensate for any angles or distortion that you cause when you take a hand-held picture of a flat document:

You can use the OCR feature to recognize text - even handwriting:

You can change the original to black and white, or greyscale (below):

And then email, print, or fax (?) the image whenever you want.

You could post student work on the website, save it for your own portfolios, etc.  Save notes from your chalkboard, or posters that students create collaboratively.  

What else could you do?  Email me if you have other ideas.