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Monday, April 30, 2012

GoodReader & Senior Theses

This time of the year I typically carry around a half dozen 50-80 page senior theses that are the basis of "thesis defenses" where students sit down with a group of faculty to orally defend their thesis work.  This year, I decided to replace the stacks of papers with electronic versions of the theses using the GoodReader App.  Within a few minutes (the introduction to the app is worth reading) I was marking corrections, adding notes, and making comments on the pdf version of the theses.  All of these comments were saved on an annotated copy of the thesis and that I used with the iPad during the defenses.  In particular, the list feature of the App that showed all of my comments allowed me to quickly recall the questions that I had on the thesis work when sitting in the defense.  A bonus is being able to save a digital version of the thesis (with my comments) that I can refer to down the road (and email to students if corrections need to be made).   The paper versions of drafts with comments inevitably get recycled and I have encountered a few situations where having the "paper trail" of comments/corrections would have been useful.  Based on this positive experience,  I plan on giving GoodReader a try when evaluating student manuscripts in my courses this fall.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks, Greg! You and Daena have convinced me that this strategy is worth a try. Am also eager to try CloudOn for access to my mainstay, MS Word tracking. Thanks to FTI 2012, and Erica's March blog post, for that tip as well.

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