At the time of this post, my students are distracted by a wasp in my classroom. They’re supposed to be reading, and rather than heed my warnings about being held after class into their lunch, they’re abuzz with fear of being stung. I’m wishing that the wasp could magically transform into a ladybug or fly for the sake of getting my class back in order.
It’s the same way I feel when I have a PDF or screenshot of a document, and I want to edit it in Google Docs. Both of these formats can be tricky or cumbersome to convert. The process for doing this is so simple, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself (unless you already did).
PDF to Google Doc
Here’s a PDF that I plan to use in the future:
[embeddoc url=”https://kimberlyl.edublogs.org/files/2016/02/Concluding-paragraph-examples-22m1sih.pdf” viewer=”google”]
I want to be able to have an editable copy so that I can use different examples if needed, as well as create a graphic organizer so that they could fill in the examples themselves.
Copy and Paste
When I highlighted the entire text and then pasted it into Google Docs, it ended up looking like this:
It’s a jumbled mess definitely doesn’t resemble the original document.
“Open In” Google Docs
The better method is to:
- In a web browser, go to Google Drive. Find your file, and then right click on it.
- Select “Open In” and then “Google Docs”
This time my file looks like this:
While it isn’t in the format of a table, it looks MUCH more like the original. I can easily insert the information into a table, or just keep it as is (which is what I plan to do).
Image to Google Doc
At times my students have encountered problems submitting an assignment from Notability or even Google Docs (glitchy iPads!), so I ask them to instead submit a screenshot of their work. The problem lies in the fact that a PNG or JPEG of their writing isn’t conducive to writing feedback (especially if you comment directly in the form as I mentioned last week). Therefore, converting it to a Google Doc is a must!
Here’s an image of a student’s rough draft of an essay:
“Open In” Google Docs
- In a web browser, go to Google Drive. Find your file, and then right click on it.
- Select “Open In” and then “Google Docs”
The first page will be the image itself. You can simply click on it and delete it.
The next page will be the editable text:
There may be a few odd characters on the page (such as the 100% at the bottom of the page, which was the amount of battery the student had left), but those could be easily deleted. You might notice that it even separates it into paragraphs!
Before you get too excited…
This works best with text-based PDFs and images. It won’t work if the original document has more images than text.
This PDF:
Converted to this in Google Docs:
Therefore, I recommend using this method to convert texts for editing.
Let me know how this works for you, I’m sure you’ll be a convert!
