Commenting on Student Lectures

As more class materials are made available to students and colleagues via PDF, one of the easiest ways to take notes is by using the mark-up tools in Acrobat. Enabling Commenting for Adobe Reader users ensures that everyone can participate.

The real power of commenting however, comes when you use Acrobat Pro.

One way to show these commenting tools is by selecting Tools > Comment & Markup > Show Comment & markup toolbar.My favorites are the Highlight tool, Sticky note, and the Text Box tool.

With the highlight tool, a simple checkbox in the commenting preferences of Acrobat will copy whatever you highlight into a comment layer. You can also check a box that will copy any text you encircle into a comment layer. In Acrobat preferences, go to General > preferences> and check the last two boxes at the bottom of the dialog box.With the TextBox tool you can draw a rectangle anywhere on the PDF and type or paste whatever text you want into it. It makes it easy to mark-up your lecture notes anyway you like.

The sticky note lets you create a pop-up note anywhere you like and add/copy text into it.

The advantage of all comment tools are that all comments show up in the Comment panel of Acrobat. These comments when clicked will move the users focus to the area in the PDF where the comment was made.

Even cooler is the ability to summarize all comments into a separate PDF allowing you to organize them in a way that will work for you. Select Comments > Summarize Comments to see the options.You can also import other student's comments into the same set of lecture notes
so that a comprehensive set of notes can be assembled.

To wrap up the process, Choose File > Export > Word Document to re-use your extracted notes in a new Word document.Once you get used to this, you will be amazed at the time you save and the trees you save!

Go Green!

Here is a link to a video at Adobe Design Center on using the comment tools.

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/?id=vid0311

Please share your thoughts and ideas on using these tools in your environment.

We would love to hear from you!

Commenting and posting notes especially work well when a committee is reviewing a student thesis or dissertation. Instead of each faculty member reading a draft and making separate comments, the student can send a pdf to first one member of the committee, usually the Chair for comments and corrections, and then that pdf is send to the next member for additional comments and corrections and then a third or fourth member, who can add to over all review of the paper, which can be summarized as Steve described. This helps to avoids each reviewer making the same correction, or conflicting statements and provides a record of comments should a committee member forgot what was said before and issue a conflicting statement for the poor confused student.

I agree with you guys but now a days Education is very very important they read a lots of things newly...

I have recently starting using PDFs for my online training web site. Why don't sticky notes appear when a page is viewed in a browser? I can upload and download from my server without an y lose, but if I save a pdf that is displayed in the browser, the sticky note have vanished.

Would you want the users of you site to add their comments to a PDF and save that PDF on the web server for all other users to see or add even more comments.

If so, look at the shared review process within Acrobat, but there is talk of Adobe changing this process. Also all your users will need newer versions of Acrobat/Reader that can support the Web based review.

Thanks for your reply. No, I do not want students to be able to save comments on the server, or alter the pdf in any way I simply want to use sticky notes like popup windows. I currently use version 9 of reader.

Reader can not add comments until the PDF has special commenting and saving rights applied to the PDF. Then you need to have the PDF in an environment where you can edit and save the PDF.

Sorry, I misled you I create my pdfs Acrobat 9 but my students use reader. I can create the pdf with sticky notes ok, ftp them to my server but when the files are accessed in a browser ( I have tried 4 different ones) they lose the sticky notes. If I download them from the browser the result is the same. If however, I download using ftp the notes are still there.