How to Add Voice Comments to PDFs and Word Documents

People who subscribe to the weekly Practical Ed Tech newsletter got this tip yesterday. But this is too good not to share with everyone. Kaizena, originally just a tool for voice commenting on Google Docs, can also be used to add voice comments to PDFs and Word documents. The process of using Kaizena for voice commenting on PDFs and Word documents isn't quite as streamlined as it is for Google Docs, but it's still fairly easy to do. Watch my video that is embedded below to learn how to add voice comments to PDFs and Word documents.


Applications for Education
Adding voice comments to your students' documents can be an efficient way to give them feedback on their work. Voice commenting allows you to give full, customized explanations to your students. It also helps to have students literally hear the comments in your voice as opposed to trying to interpret the tone of your written comment.

Poetica Introduces Groups for Editing Online as if You Were Writing on Paper

Back in April I wrote about a neat service called Poetica that you can use to edit documents almost as if you were writing on paper. This month Poetica is introducing groups. Groups will allow you to share drafts of documents with reader that you invite to your group. You can register for access to groups by completing the form here.

Editing writing in Poetica is very similar to the manner in which we have written edits on papers for years. When you read a document in Poetica you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you then write your comments. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above a line in the document you're editing. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red.

Applications for Education
Poetica supports importing Word files, PDFs, and Rich Text documents. If your school doesn't use Google Drive, Poetica could be a great tool for editing your students' written work. The visual connections between your markings and the comments could make it easier for your students to match your suggestions to specific portions of their documents.

Poetica - Edit Documents Online as if You Were Writing on Paper

Poetica is a neat new service for collaborative editing of documents. The best feature of Poetica is its similarity to writing on a paper document. While reading a document you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you write your comment. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above the line. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red.

Applications for Education
Poetica supports importing Word files, PDFs, and Rich Text documents. If your school doesn't use Google Drive, Poetica could be a great tool for editing your students' written work. The visual connections between your markings and the comments could make it easier for your students to match your suggestions to specific portions of their documents.

Try Crocodoc for Collaboratively Annotating PDFs

Yesterday, I received an email from a reader who was looking for a free tool that she and her students could use to collaboratively annotate PDFs. While you can comment on PDFs in Google Drive, you can't yet anchor those comments to a specific part of a PDF (at least I haven't figured out how to do that yet). The tool that I recommended instead is Crocodoc.

Crocodoc is a simple service that allows users to quickly share and edit PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint files.To use Crocodoc just upload your file, select your marking tool, and get to work. Crocodoc provides a unique url for every file you upload. Share that url with the people you want to have comment on your PDF, Word file, or PowerPoint slides. You can also embed your file into a blog post or webpage and allow people to comment on it there.

Applications for Education
Crocodoc could be very useful for online peer editing of documents. You could also embed a document into your class blog and ask students to comment on what they're reading. You might also use an embedded document with annotations to model proper peer editing practices.