The following is a guest post written by Cindy Pearson of PDFconverter.com. If you would like to submit a guest post, please contact us.
The Internet and its technologies have done much for making knowledge accessible to everyone for free. Thanks to the Internet and software developers, online teachers have at their disposal a wide variety of tools for spreading the knowledge to anyone, anywhere, in any time-zone. One useful tool that online educators can include in their toolbox is a PDF conversion suite. PDF converters come in various forms: as installable desktop software packages, completely web-based, or mobile applications.
Benefits of PDF tools in online education
PDF conversion tools can help both educators and students present and share their assignments, reports and projects in a universal format that can be viewed on any device without needing to install the native application used for creating the original documents.
Most Common Uses of PDF Conversion Tools in Education
Here are six ways online learners and teachers can use PDF converters in online education:
- Create and Share Documents Without Losing the Original Formatting
If you’ve ever received a Microsoft Word document from another person, and opened it on your own device in MS Word, chances are that it looked a bit messy. It may look even messier when opened in LibreOffice or OpenOffice Writer. This mess is what often happens when documents are shared in editable formats such as .doc, .xls or .ppt. If you want your documents to look tidy and professional on any device, running on any operating system, convert them to PDF format prior to attaching them to an email or sharing them online. - Make PDF Slideshows from PPT Slides
Students use Powerpoint slides to showcase their work and assignments, and teachers use Powerpoint slides to present course material in a clear and visually appealing way. Turning Powerpoint slides into PDF slideshows will allow you to view the presentation across different devices, without needing to install Powerpoint on each device. - Make PDF eTextBooks
Online document sharing and online education have contributed to the rise of eBooks. With a PDF converter, you can quickly create textbooks for your students and share these books with them electronically. - Convert Old PDF Presentations and Reversion them In PowerPoint
Most professional teachers and educators use many presentations and slideshows in their work. Consequently, after a few years of teaching experience, educators may have a pretty good archive or electronic repository of valuable learning materials, often stored in PDF – the best format for archiving purposes. These goodies can often become useful for present classes or training sessions, if only updated or modified. Instead of retyping them, it is far more efficient to translate them to editable PowerPoint files and simply edit inaccurate information, remove unnecessary details or add additional content. - Turn Archived Lessons into Editable .DOC and Update Them
Archived lessons can be repurposed and reused just like presentations. A good, high-quality PDF-to-Doc converter can come in very handy if you want to brush-up or rework a number of your old lesson plans, grading sheets, exercises or quizzes. - Edit Your Essays and Book Reports
Have you ever created an essay or research paper for your class, saved it as a non-editable PDF to prohibit people from altering the contents, and then simply deleted its editable MS Word counterpart? If you have done this, don’t worry, it happens to the best of us! Sometimes our work doesn’t need any editing, but very often changes or improvements are needed, or feedback from teachers or colleagues could spark an idea that we’d like to implement. In such a case, the only way to edit the multi-page essay or book report without retyping it is to convert it from PDF to its original, editable format using a PDF conversion tool.
Luckily, there are many PDF converters out there today. If you are looking for one that would enable you to do all of the above and more, check out PDF Converter. It is a free web-based suite that enables you to create PDFs online from over 300 file formats and convert PDF to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Once you’ve tried it, come back here and share how you’ve used PDF converters in your online studies and teaching practices. Share your ideas with others and get inspired by the ideas of fellow teachers and students.
Reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Touro College.
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