PDF tools are universally accessible and necessary for everyone and anyone who uses PDF files daily. Among those who use PDF files every day and all the time are students and educators at various levels of education. They were mostly the purview of secondary or university-level students, but after the pandemic shut down schools worldwide, many elementary and high-school students began using them for their ease of use, versatility, and universality as they could be used for many different purposes.
The Ways Teachers Can Work with PDF Files
PDF files are useful to educators in so many different ways. They are excellent ways to gather, collate, create and share information with a wide range of users. Many online sources also come in PDF format, which makes downloading them and then using modern PDF editors to make changes like editing or commenting much easier.
PDFs can also be helpful to teachers by giving them a format that can easily be shared with students. A PDF, at least in the virtual realm, can also be collaborative as a teacher can share a PDF in real-time with their students and make changes to it or solicit suggestions from the online class on how what, or where to make changes.
When giving out assignments or homework to their students, teachers can also make fillable forms that students do not need to print, scan or copy. They can be filled out online and returned to their teachers who can more easily read their responses, add comments or mark certain passages or highlight specific answers.
How Students Can Use PDF Tools
Students can use PDF tools in a variety of ways that serve their particular academic purposes. Depending on the education level (school-age or university), Students can use PDF tools in a variety from viewing and adding comments to a document or, if higher education is involved, creating new PDFs or making fillable forms to send to other classmates.
A PDF for students can represent many different things. It can be the format of their take-home assignment, the format of their paper, or the way they present information from a research project or a petition or questionnaire made to share with other students. Whatever a student needs a PDF for, the format can accommodate those needs.
PDF Tools and Teacher-Student Engagement
While many view the PDF as a replacement for actual student-teacher interaction, or student-to-student interaction for that matter, it is adept at providing new avenues for teachers and students to connect. A PDF can be shared and viewed by many different people at the same time, which is something a program like Lumin PDF can offer.
With Lumin, a teacher can upload their document to the program, share it with the entire class and then sync it to a general class cloud-based drive like Google Drive. With every change or edit PDF files saved to the cloud and available to everyone, a virtual classroom can view the PDF in real-time and collaborate around it.
The teachers can highlight a specific passage and solicit thoughts and opinions from a virtual class. They can then write or annotate the document with the PDF editor or continue highlighting important and relevant passages. All these changes can then be saved and referenced when the document is viewed again by the same group, or individually during the asynchronous study.
What Is the Best Online PDF Editor For Education?
It’s not just about learning how to write on a pdf but choosing the right editor. Lumin PDF is an easy-to-use, widely available PDF editor that offers high-level editing and organizational tools for all your PDF needs. There are several similar programs out there that offer similar tools and features, but Lumin is available for both online and offline use and has a downloadable app for mobiles that are compatible with both iOS and Android.
Lumin is available for free for a short trial period, but it offers several subscriber plans to unlock the more advanced features of the program, while also offering unlimited use of its tools and access to technical support. Some of the more advanced features include OCR technology for use with scanned documents and a large database of premade PDF templates that can be changed according to your needs.