School Program For Juvenile Offenders Facilitates Learning With ABBYY Finereader Technology
ABBYY, a leading provider of recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies, recently announced that Metsker Heights Alternative School, a high school program serving juvenile offenders, has selected ABBYY's FineReader Professional optical character recognition (OCR) solution to automate text capture and facilitate learning.
"Our students are generally highly reluctant learners with short attention spans, and long histories of academic failure and disciplinary problems," said Duane Bean, head teacher at Metsker Heights. "Our use of ABBYY FineReader has greatly simplified important but time-consuming assignments, helping to avoid the kind of unproductive frustration that leads to students shutting down. FineReader removes much of the drudge work, so that students can spend their precious classroom time on the real business of learning."
Administered by the Willamette Educational Service District (WESD), Metsker Heights is a short-term behavioral and academic day school for high school-aged students living in temporary foster homes. In addition to the challenge of their foster care placement, Metsker students have also been identified with emotional and learning disorders that cause them to experience significant behavioral, social and academic difficulties. Not surprisingly, these characteristics impede the students¹ ability to perform on basic school assignments involving time-intensive tasks, such as copying literary passages from novels and short stories, material that is then used for "double entry journals" and other Language Arts assignments.
Using ABBYY FineReader, literary texts can be scanned and converted into searchable Microsoft Word documents, freeing slow typists from typing whole passages of text, or worse, copying them out in long-hand. Students can effortlessly navigate and search these Word documents for the desired text or quote, helping to establish a real sense of ownership over their assignments. The technology is particularly useful for out-of-print texts that no longer can be purchased for the classroom. Relevant portions can be scanned, and FineReader then provides completely searchable and editable texts for student use.
ABBYY FineReader is an affordable, easy-to-use optical character recognition (OCR) and document conversion application which delivers precision accuracy in converting almost any type of document including text books, lecture notes, exams, magazine articles, tables and spreadsheets. FineReader readily transforms educational documents into fully editable and searchable electronic files for educators and students alike, and recognizes 184 languages including newly added support for Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Japanese, Thai and Hebrew.
"I had been using a competitor's OCR solution for about a year when I discovered FineReader, and I quickly came to see it as a far superior product," adds Bean. "For my purposes, FineReader surpasses other technologies in three key respects: the intuitive user interface results in a low learning curve, the OCR is the most accurate I've found and I can set the scanner to shoot an image at timed intervals, a huge timesaver for anyone without a document feeder. FineReader has increased my productivity by allowing me to spend more time on creating exciting lessons."
"Anything that can be done to aid educators in creating an environment in which technology facilitates learning is worthwhile," said Dean Tang, president and CEO at ABBYY USA. "ABBYY FineReader technology delivers unmatched accuracy, and an innovative interface designed to provide increased user productivity with less steps and effort spent on OCR tasks than ever before. Teachers and students alike can benefit from easy-to-use and time-saving alternatives to manually retyping documents."
For more information about ABBYY's products, please visit the company's website at www.ABBYY.com.
About ABBYY
ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY software to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, and Montgomery County Government of the USA. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world's top manufacturers such as BenQ, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK and Japan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com.
SOURCE: ABBYY