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Thursday, April 29, 2010

PDFs + Windows = Happy Teacher


As most people who know me already know, I am a Mac Girl.  To me, Macs make more sense, they work better and I think they are a better value for the money (we still have an iBook G4 at home that's working-although since it's PowerPC it doesn't get updates...point is, it still works). 

I have noticed that while most PCs hardware isn't great, their software (and especially their operating systems) are improving.  It seems that Windows has been inspired by much of Apple's OS functionality and is copying them-which is great (since I'm PC at work).

One such item is the abilty to make PDFs without downloading things.  Office 2007 finally worked this in and now it seems so has Adobe/Windows. 

Everyone that knows me knows that I also 'do' interactive notebook in my classes.  This year, I have started to post all work in the notebook by page on Blackboard, which has been fantastic for both me and my students. 

They are able to get (and stay) caught up in class and they don't have to ask me for everything anymore.  It's especially nice when my students miss class. 

One problem I had early on with posting everything on Blackboard  was that all of my kids didn't have Word 07 (some didn't have Word at all), but by posting all documents as PDFs, all students could open the files.  I now convert everything to a PDF or upload it to Googledocs


Recently, my Dell has made PDFing much easier:  just right-click the Word file, and without opening anything, convert documents to PDFs (the picture below will show you all the steps).  Love it.


















And, you can also convert websites into PDFs, so if your students need to use an online resource to complete some work, you can easily make it a PDF for them.

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