Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Zamzar - Not Just for Video

Do you ever save an article or other text as a pdf for your students? What do they do if they need to listen to it? One option is to use the built in "Read Out Loud" feature under the "View" toolbar. But that doesn't allow you to highlight every word and you can easily lose your place in your document.

Enter Zamzar, free online file conversion. You may have tried it to convert blocked online videos to a format that you can then share in your school.

Did you know you can use the same tool to convert pdfs to doc?

I tried it with a one page and a two page pdf. Zamzar converted the one page pdf and sent it to my email address in 30 minutes. It took 60 minutes to convert and email the two page pdf. With the free account, you don't have any priority conversion (there are three levels of pricing that provide you with priority conversion). But with enough planning, you should be fine. I have always received conversions within 24 hours.

And now you know another way to make documents digital and accessible for your students.

(Learned about this trick from today's TechLearning "The IT Guy.")

4 comments:

Paul Hamilton said...

Thanks Karen. This is a really helpful tip! --Paul

Jackie Ballarini said...

Wow! Thanks for the tip, I can't wait to try it.

Jim Gates said...

The only thing I'm not liking about zamzar is the fact of the popup ads. VERY annoying. But otherwise the service is very nice.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this helpful tip. :)