PDF work for teachers

A revision pack is usually assembled from a textbook extract, a past paper, something from a colleague and a page you wrote yourself. Merging puts them in one document in the order you choose, and page numbers added afterwards make it referenceable in class — 'turn to page nine' only works if page nine exists.

Number after merging, not before. Numbering the parts first gives you four documents that each start at one.

Feeding a stack of handed-in work through a document feeder produces one long PDF. If every submission is the same length, splitting into fixed-size chunks separates them in one step. If they vary, extracting page ranges is the reliable route.

If the scans need to be searchable — so you can find a particular pupil's name or a specific answer across the whole set — run recognition over the file first. It reads the printed text and leaves the pages looking identical.

A phone photo of a page is a picture of a document, not a document: it is dark, the paper is grey, and it is enormous. Capturing it properly — cropping to the page and letting the tool bring the paper back to white — produces something that prints legibly and is a fraction of the size.

The same is true of whiteboard photographs, where the aim is the opposite: keep the marker colours while lifting the background to white.

A worksheet designed as a dark-background slide will consume an enormous amount of ink on paper. Inverting the colours before printing turns it back to dark text on white, which is both cheaper and easier to read on the page.

Also worth checking before a class set goes to the printer: whether the file contains pages you do not need. Deleting them is faster than telling thirty pupils to ignore pages four to six.

Marked work, reports and anything with a pupil's name in it is personal data belonging to a child. Uploading it to a free converter to reorder some pages is a data transfer, and in most schools an unauthorised one.

Processing locally sidesteps the question rather than answering it — the file never leaves the device, so there is nothing to disclose, log or justify.

Marked work returned as a PDF should be one file per pupil, not a bundle everybody can read. Splitting a marked batch back into individual documents before returning it is the difference between feedback and a data-protection incident — a class list of grades sent to thirty families is a disclosure to twenty-nine people who should not have it.

If the work was marked on a form or a rubric with fillable fields, flatten it before returning it. Otherwise the comments may not appear at all on a parent's phone, and can be edited by anyone who opens it.

A pack assembled once is worth keeping in a form that can be rearranged. Keeping the merged document alongside the parts makes next year's edit a matter of swapping one section rather than rebuilding the whole thing.

Where a pack carries a date, a class name or a term in a header, putting that in a header rather than typing it onto a page means it can be changed in one step for the next cohort.