PDFs have become an essential part of the documentation in every walk of life. And rightfully so. This format is the most convenient, secure, and compact document type. Undoubtedly, it is the most preferred format in the learning landscape too. However, not everyone is very comfortable using PDFs.
Educators can use PDFs in so many ways, and once you start exploring them, you will be amazed by how much you have been missing out till now. So, if you wish to digitize teaching and include PDFs in learning, we have seven ideas for you. But first, let’s discuss how you can create a PDF.
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How to Create a PDF?
Creating PDFs is really a cakewalk. Almost all applications, including MS Word, MS Excel, and Powerpoint, allow you to export or save your work in PDF format. You can also save a webpage, a photo, or anything on a browser by simply printing it in PDF.
7 Ideas to Use PDFs in Learning
Digitize Study Material
Often, when you teach the class, students are busy taking notes. But if you create a system where you give them the PDFs of the content before or at the end of the session, you can achieve more attention and understanding of the topic on the students’ part.
Learners can also sign up on platforms like EssayService to get help with their assignments and participate more by studying the material in advance. “You can merge pdfs into a single file using https://www.sodapdf.com/pdf-merge/ as it’s free and easy to use”
Create Online Workbook
This idea, too, will help you reduce paperwork inside and outside the classroom. You can create an online workbook to have your students work on practice questions. Once you develop some templates, you won’t have to prepare workbooks from scratch every time. PDFs also make it easy to keep their homework saved in one place without a pile of notebooks at your desk.
Initiate a Class Newsletter
Class newsletters are a fun way to keep your students engaged and willing to participate. This digital newsletter could comprise interesting events and news related to class and school, contemporary issues, editorials, stories, ideas, and more.
This practice will open a huge opportunity for your students to learn writing, boost creativity, and develop management skills. Instead of asking their peers to write my paper, they will feel more confident in working on their assignments. This kind of activity will also encourage team building among the students.
Customize Tests
Customized tests are crucial to measuring students’ knowledge of the topic. However, creating these takes a lot of time, and in the case of remote classrooms, it gets quite inconvenient to share these tests with everyone. To save time, you can prepare test papers with your own sets of questions in fillable PDF format.
Send this PDF to every student online, and they will fill in the answers using a PDF editor. When you receive all the answer sheets, you can keep them organized in a folder on your computer and use them for reference and feedback in the future.
Assess Online Assignments With On-The-Spot Remarks
Reviewing assignments and sharing feedback takes a long route when done offline. You can instead give online assignments and ask students to share them in PDF formats. You can then add your comments and annotations directly to the files and reshare them. It makes the overall process easier and quicker, allowing you to document each student’s progress.
Document and Organize Classroom Activities
Documenting classroom activities, lesson plans, and student profiles helps you keep your classroom and learning organized. With PDFs, you can manage it all smoothly. For instance, add links to assessments, assignments, scorecards, and other documents to each student’s profile. The files for lesson plans and classroom activities will help you plan future classes and streamline learning.
Export Presentations to PDFs
Try to enhance your presentations by converting them into PDFs. You can restrict editing and send these files to your students before class. They can refer to these during the session if they need to.
This way, you can ensure that the format and content of the presentation are intact and everybody is on the same page. These presentations can also come in handy for a quick revision.
Use OCR to Arrange More Study Materials
Every once in a while, you may come across something interesting and deem it fit as an additional study material. However, these resources may require typing the content to make it shareable, or you will need to get them photocopied. This is where OCR comes in. OCR tools convert images into PDFs.
Whether it is newspaper cutting, a few pages of a book, or a handwritten piece, you can scan it and convert it into a PDF file. There are many OCR tools available for free on the Internet.
Benefits of PDFs in Classrooms
- PDF is a lossless file format, allowing you to store information for as long as you want.
- Since the content cannot be altered, rest assured that no one can make changes to your saved PDF files.
- You can save the final grades of your students in PDF format to ensure that they don’t change anything in their scorecards.
- You can also gather parents’ feedback by sending them questionnaires in PDF format at the end of each term.
Conclusion
PDFs are a solution to many aspects of learning, from planning lessons to creating study material. This file format is simple, small, and compatible with all devices, making it versatile and user-friendly. So, if you are yet to include it in your classroom, this is your sign. Use the above ideas to aid learning for your students.
