Office Lens is basically a portable scanner in your pocket, allowing you to capture pictures of whiteboards, documents, and receipts to save and edit them digitally. The beauty of Office Lens as opposed to other scanning applications is that Microsoft offers integration with Microsoft Office.

How does Office Lens integrate with Office?

• Office Lens will covert images into Word and PowerPoint files, and even PDF documents.
• Office Lens enables images to be sent via email. One can share whiteboard notes, submit receipts and ensure that family and friends have copies of important paper documents|.
• You can choose to convert images to Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), or PDF (.pdf) files that are automatically saved to OneDrive.

How do I get Office Lens?
Microsoft has made this Widows app available as an Android app on Google Play and an iPhone app from iTunes.

How does Office Lens work? 

This video beautifully demonstrates Office Lens in  action.

How to get started with Office Lens

Step 1: Download Office Lens

Step 2: Install Office Lens on your device, open the app, then give it permission to access your camera.
Step 3: The default “view” in the app is a live camera viewfinder. Choose one of the three available image types — Photo, Document or Whiteboard and then point the camera at whatever you want to capture.
Step 4: Decide what you ant to do with the image and where you want to store it.

Uses for education
There is so much you can do with this app in the classroom:

• The scans can go into OneNote on your phone, This means it will be synced across your devices .
• Teachers can grade and annotate paper reports and share them with individual students or the entire class.
• Teachers can share lesson plans, lecture or meeting notes and other documents in a central designated site.
• Students and teachers can capture classroom brainstorm sessions from a whiteboard or chalkboard into OneNote and then search by keyword with the Office Lens optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can edit or copy text into other documents or email.
• Students can take pictures of presentations or whiteboards, eliminating the need to take notes during lectures.
• Students can capture and share class projects, lab experiments, math equations and physical documents and securely store them as digital content in one place for easy retrieval.