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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Annotating the Syllabus - Live in Class

Like many teachers, I treat my course's syllabus as a contract with my students.  The syllabus contains a variety of pertinent information that students will need to know throughout the course.  To make my presentation of the syllabus more engaging, I decided to annotate it using the GoodReader app live in class.  This app allowed me both to highlight and free-draw directly on a PDF of my syllabus.  I used this as a tool to focus student attention on some of the most crucial information in the syllabus, like my office hours, late penalties, and the attendance policy.

I also found this to be a fairly low-risk way to get use to projecting the ipad in the classroom.  Projection using the "laptop" setting on the tower worked seamlessly and automatically.   I did, however, have some trouble importing my file using webdisk.  Does anyone know if this is possible?

In response to Daena's query about other PDF annotation apps, I haven't used the others so I can't make any comparisons, but I can say that GoodReader also has the ability to "flatten" files so they can be easily distributed.

1 comment:

  1. Ellen, I've had good luck using a DropBox account to access files on my iPad. WebDisk doesn't work very well with the iPad since there really isn't a mobile app for it.

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