Three Things I Learned This Week

 

Two of the three things I learned this week are related to working with PDFs which can be a frustrating endeavor and often involves the use of all kinds of extra stuff.  These two solutions keep it simple!

1. A Simple Way to Translate PDFs

I feel like we've been trying to find a good way to translate PDFs to other languages for forever!  I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner.

• Go to translate.google.com and click Documents.  
• Click to browse your computer and select the desired PDF
• Select the desired language, click translate, and click download translation when it is done.

This works for PowerPoints and Word documents as well.  Need to translate Google Slides?  Go to the file menu and download the Slides as a PDF then use translate.google.com to translate the PDF.

2. Another Way to Annotate PDFs

This chromebook annotation option for PDFs is incredibly easy and requires no extensions.

• Download the PDF and make sure it goes to your downloads NOT Google Drive.
• Open the files app, go to downloads, and open the PDF.  (It should open in a window with a toolbar at the top.  If not, go back to files and downloads, right click on the PDF, and select Gallery).
• Make your annotations and click Save.

The annotated PDF can then be uploaded or attached to an assignment, email, etc.  To save the annotated PDF to Google Drive, Click the 3 dots and select save as.

The third thing I learned this week was a common sense solution for maintaining an online Google Form on a chromebook for students to fill out in the main office.

3. A Better Way to Display Office Forms

There is often a Google Form that we'd like to be open on a chromebook for students to complete as the need arises throughout the school day.  The question of what account to sign in inevitably comes up along with the need to protect the user's Drive, email, etc.  This solution probably should have been obvious.

• Use bitly to create a shortened version of the URL (web address) for the desired Google Form.
• Power on the chromebook and select browse as guest.  (If the browse as guest option doesn't appear, contact the office of computing services.  Browse as guest is NOT an option on student chromebooks.)
• Enter the shortened URL in the web address bar.

😊 These three things made my entire week better!  I hope someone else finds them useful, too.