Free Microsoft Office Lens speeds productivity

Posted on May 19, 2016 by E.A. Draffan

Taking an photo of the screen

Office lens is a free app available on an iPhone, Android and Window smartphone that links to One Drive accounts and allows you to take photographs and put them straight into Microsoft Office applications. The really good thing about Office Lens is that when I take a picture of a presentation or whiteboard I can make sure it is exactly the right shape and is straight not set at an angle using the outline on the screen by selecting the document or whiteboard menu item.

Making sure the image is straight for OCR

That is really important if you are taking photos of text that you want to have read aloud later. If they appear out of focus or at an odd angle you will not be able to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR), to have the image converted to text so you can use a text to speech or screen reader application later on. Once you have taken your photo you choose which application you want to send it to and if this is Microsoft Word it will extract the text. The other options are your photos on the phone, OneNote, OneDrive, PowerPoint and Outlook or your phone mail if you want to send it as an email attachment. The app will also save it as a PDF.

Ready for exporting

The best thing I like about Office Lens is how it is linked to OneNote because I can collect all the images, notes and presentations, even photos of handwritten notes straight into my Notes folder and then I can search for them at any time, as I really have trouble remembering what I have heard in lectures etc and this process acts as a back up .

Getting started with Microsoft Office Lens from cnet

Abi James – Researcher University of Southampton.

Free ssOverlay to tint the screen

Posted on April 19, 2016 by E.A. Draffan

I use coloured glasses when working with computers but our network has ssOverlay. which I can use if I forget them! You can select the colour you want from settings arrow and activate the overlay. It covers the screen completely and can be turned off and on from the bottom right of the taskbar. where a small yellow arrow can be seen. Right hand mouse and you can exit the program. It is very simple and easy to use.

ssOverlay (921Kb download )
“Very similar to Dark Screen, ssOverlay (the ss stands for Scotopic Sensitivity), places a coloured overlay onto the screen. The colour and transparency levels can be adjusted to suit the user.”

Gloucester College student working on StemReader for Maths that has now been superseded by equation reading in Microsoft Word and TextHelp EquatIO

Evernote for Research

Posted on November 19, 2013 by E.A. Draffan

Evernote is the “most useful app. Good layout and easy to organise my notes and research. Able to synchronise with laptop. I can use a notebook for each of my modules. I find the ability to synchronise whatever I input on iPad with laptop. Excellent for storing notes which were made earlier, easy to find, no more searching through pages in books. Far superior to Notebook+ and Notebook. This app really met my needs.”

EM University of Birmingham iPad project

Evernote is available for Windows, Mac, Android and Blackberry.

YouTube video –How to clip web pages to Evernote from your iPad

Autograph in trial mode for box and whisker plots.

Posted on October 31, 2013 by E.A. Draffan

“I simply went onto Google and wrote in ‘Autograph’ and downloaded the trial version – this is 30 days and is free, or you can pay for a proper version. I believe if you get the trial version, you can still use all the functions.

Normality Box Plot

For the purposes of my essay I needed to use a box and whisker plot, something that is very difficult to do on Excel! I used mean data from Excel, to create the is box and whisker plot. To create a box and whisker plot you open up Autograph, and click on the button FILE- then new 1D statistics page – Then right click anywhere on the grid and click the button enter raw data- you should see a column that is named Data with an ‘x’ below- enter your means from Excel by copying and pasting into the column which is marked with an ‘x’ above- then press OK- after this in the bottom left hand corner- you should have a caption saying ‘RAW DATA 1’ right click this and then pick the option ‘Box and Whisker Diagram’ it will then create your box and whisker plot!

You can then play around, changing colour, you can also click on the screwdriver button – (in yellow) and then click’ labels’- this will allow you to put axis and label them.

I have only used it very basically as this was the purpose for my assignment- but I am sure the more you play around with it- the more charts and options you will have.”

Hannah course : Prof. Prac. in Health Sciences, University of Southampton

Here is a YouTube version –Box and Whisker Plot in Autograph

MyScript Calculator for handwritten calculations

Posted on September 11, 2013 by E.A. Draffan

“I really like the way I can scribble a maths equation on my iPhone and it will recognise my writing and then give me the answer!”

MyScript Calculator is free and can be downloaded onto an iPad, iPhone or Android tablet or phone. It is easy to use and copes with quite complex mathematical operations.

Rumi – RCAST, University of Tokyo

AudioNote for iPad & iPhone

Posted on July 11, 2013 by E.A. Draffan

AudioNote is a fantastic note taking app. The official description from the app store tells you how you can synchronise notes and audio with each key point being linked to the moment when the lecturer talks about that subject. Because it works on a tablet or phone there is no need to wait for the laptop to boot up.

Bookmarks can be created throughout the audio recording to highlight important points for easy referencing. It allows you to take pictures and insert them into your notes and AudioNotes can be exported to Evernote, saved and organised there. A yellow background can be used instead of white for those with visual stress/sensitivity. It costs £2.99 and is available from the iTunes store.

This YouTube video is a good introduction to AudioNote

This comes with thanks to the Disability Advisory Service at Imperial College

Lexdis 2.0

Accessible technology for learning

Category Archives: STEM