Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Digital Highlighting Enlightenment!


How did I miss this? How is it that I wasn't aware that this could be done? Tonight I blindly discovered by hitting a random web page that Adobe Acrobat Reader allows text and highlighting annotations. This after spending the past few weeks searching with Darlene Bassett for an easy solution for using these features for working with kids on summarization skills using digital text. You might recall this post of July 29. I had thought that web-based Awesome Highlighter was the best solution, only to get a report back from Ed Latham that there had been issues when he tried it out with a group at a workshop he was doing.

So this evening, when I happened upon this, I was encouraged . . . and indeed wasn't disappointed when I tried it. And more importantly, I found that Apple's Preview works just as slick as Adobe in this regard. Simply save anything as a pdf using the PRINT/SAVE AS PDF method and you're good to go.

Now I suspect that this must have been pointed out to me sometime in the past, and I really should have known, but I'm elated that the answer to my search has presented itself. It's been a good day!

Now what else have I missed in the highlighting/annotation world? Suppose next I'll find out that there is a built-in ability to do this in OS X. And yes, I do know Noteshare does it, but student machines at the high schools where this is going to be used do not have Noteshare.

Preview's Hidden Powers

2 comments:

  1. Hey this is Joel from the Awesome Highlighter. Sorry you guys had problems...there are still some issues with the product and we're always trying to improve it. Highlighting arbitrary html is a little bit more complicated than highlighting pdfs, but we're fixing up as many of the problems as we can. Hope you come back and check us out again some time. Thanks for the previous mention, we appreciate it.

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  2. Thanks for the feedback, Joel. I will continue to keep an eye on Awesome Highlighter. It certainly has some awesome possibilities.

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