Using and annotating PDFs in Google Drive

Student research can generate lots of paper -- drafts of student work, of course, but also lots and lots of printing of articles, websites, book excerpts and anything else students are expected to annotate as part of their research. Online annotation can be a solution to this, but it requires some thought about how you interact with your documents.

For students who are saving everything as PDFs in their Google Drive, there are two useful solutions. One is to convert PDFs to Google Docs (did you know you can do this?) and then highlight, comment and annotate away. Just right-click on the PDF from Google Drive in a browser window and select Open with --> Google Docs to create a Google Doc with the same name as the PDF.

This works better for files with less formatting but the conversion is pretty good overall.

Another much more robust way to do this is to use a Chrome app called MetaPDF. Go to the Chrome web store to add it as an app. Then you can open PDFs using MetaPDF to highlight and comment directly on the PDF. Changes are all synced to the PDF in your Google Drive. Check out what that looks like here:

(If opening the MetaPDF app on the first use freezes the browser, here's the super-quick solution.) I found this very easy and useful; please share with your students who are looking for an online annotation solution.