Young people are usually better at using new tech than older generations. Therefore, teachers have a real challenge of mastering new software products to be far ahead of the students they teach. Old teaching methods may seem boring to students, but they become enthusiastic about all the innovative and interactive approaches to teaching. Find out engagement strategies for online learning based on PDF format. Getting students involved is not easy, but with the help of PDF, you can certainly do it!
PDF and Digitalisation of Education
The popularisation of online education began long before COVID-19, which established this form of education as the only safe one during a pandemic. The digital space has made it possible to overcome territorial boundaries and offer online courses to students from any country and region.
The choice of teaching platforms and tools for distance learning is very important, as they must ensure both a smooth transfer of knowledge and an engaging experience for students. The PDF format has become one of the most significant engagement tools for many reasons:
- PDF is a cross-platform format, which is why teachers can be sure that any student will be able to work with the proposed educational materials.
- PDF is an interactive format, thanks to which the teacher and student can communicate in the document without going to other platforms.
- Teachers can easily convert MOBI to PDF, which is very important due to the popularity of MOBI as an e-book format.
- Teachers can create engaging presentations, exercises, and flashcards in PDF format, experimenting with different ways to deliver educational material.
How to Transform Students to Active Participants Using PDF
If you want to rejuvenate the classroom experience and give it more dynamism, integrate PDF into your learning process.
Group Work
You can convert interesting educational material published in popular e-book formats into a more interactive PDF format for joint learning of books in groups. It will only take a couple of seconds to convert EPUB or MOBI to PDF and provide students with unique opportunities:
- Discuss texts together, leaving comments in a PDF file.
- Emphasise the author’s thoughts with highlighters or different colours to draw the attention of other group members.
- Annotate chapters for those concentrating on other parts of the text.
This way, you can work through a large book with your students together. It will be difficult for one student to master a large amount of material in a short period, but in a group of several students, this will be completely possible! Use PDF for students to not only deliver knowledge but also unite them in joint work.
Original Presentations
Students perceive and remember visual presentations of educational material more easily than lengthy, monotonous texts. That’s why students adore teachers who are creative in their course delivery. By transforming lectures into presentations, you will receive positive feedback from your students and recommendations to attend your course. However, the popular PPT or PPTX format for making presentations has disadvantages.
Among them are large file sizes and the need to flip through slides. For a lecture, flipping through slides is a suitable format, but for studying presentation materials for a lecture at home, it is extremely inconvenient. However, you can convert not only MOBI to PDF but also PPT/PPTX to PDF, as well as other formats used for presentations. This will allow you to present all the slides for your lecture in one PDF file.
Peer Feedback
Many students would like to try a teacher’s role. Some even dream that someday, they will begin to pass on their knowledge to others in real life. Offer them this engaging opportunity with a fun educational format called “peer feedback.” Make one student’s assignment available to another in PDF and ask for comments, questions, and advice.
In addition to being a very exciting way of interacting in an online classroom, peer feedback makes students more responsible. To evaluate another student, they must master the content of the lecture perfectly. This way, you encourage students to delve deeper into lecture topics and demonstrate their knowledge.
PDF is one of the most effective engagement tools that allows you to unite students in working on common projects. Moreover, this can be not only joint work in groups but also role-playing educational games, such as teacher/student, author critic, speaker at a conference/audience, etc.
PDF Beyond Online Education
If you teach in offline classrooms, PDF will also help you make interaction with students more fun. But besides this, the use of PDF contains other important ethical and economic aspects:
- By offering students to work with the PDF format, you encourage them to follow environmentally friendly practices.
- You will also save students’ financial resources if you offer them expensive books in PDF format. Convert MOBI to PDF and share with the class so that the most important books and textbooks can be available to any student, regardless of their financial well-being.
Final Thoughts
You can be creative in using PDF in your teaching process. The potential of this format is enormous and still awaits those creative individuals who will fully elaborate on it. When you come up with your engagement strategies for online learning, share them with your colleagues. Perhaps they will become a new trend in distance education that will help students master knowledge even more easily and teachers — deliver it to students more effectively.
Featured image by Ivan Samkov from Pexels
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