Using Google Drive as a document camera and to annotate worksheets

Document cameras can be very effective in a classroom. However good ones usually are also quite pricey. For many purposes it is actually enough to snap a picture of the document (printed material or student work) and visualize it from your Google Drive. The Google Drive app has as scanner which uploads in PDF format. Inside the browser you can open the file with the PDF viewer. The built-in PDF viewer is extremely fast, but is compromises on quality and functionality.

One way to mark up documents it to install the PDFzen viewer and editor, which provides basic tools to comfortably view and annotate (text, highlight and draw) the document. As this is still a beta version it doesn't always work as expected. In particular it is a bit slow to load and saving back to Google Drive doesn't always have the desired result. However, there are also other ways to save and share the annotated document and if you just want to use it to visualize material you might not be too interested in the save function anyway.

This video shows you the workflow.