iAnnotate for Paperless Midquarters

As we finished up turning in midquarters, I found myself reflecting on how the paperless office can actually work in ways that I hadn't expected. Usually, I'm in terror of having our wonderful proofreaders find some series of dumb grammatical or, heaven help us, spelling errors. So, I have developed over the years a sequence for trying to minimize my embarrassment. First, I type a draft of the comment into Excel (which I have set up to merge with their numerical grades into a final comment). Then, I proof in Excel and copy and paste into Senior Systems (either from the PC or from MyBackpack). Then, I print and proof and correct and reprint, cursing silently each time a comma mistake makes me reprint the entire class. Somehow, I can't catch errors as easily trying to read from the screen in Senior Systems. Paper has worked better for me, unfortunately.

For the most part, I've been avoiding printing from MyBackpack because the format of the report takes up more paper than from the PC, and I'm trying to save trees' lives.

However, this week, I happened to be away from my PC when I really wanted to work on comments. So, I was able to do the cut and paste part using Numbers  and Safari to access MyBackpack. My Excel spreadsheet opened in Numbers from its home in SkyDrive just fine. Since we can't print directly from the iPads, I logged into MyBackpack from a nearby laptop in the library and got ready to print. 

At that point, I realized that I could save the PDF forms of the report from the "Printable Version" (see below), email them to myself, "Open In" on the iPad, and do my usual 'paper' editing on iAnnotate with a stylus. I think it worked like a charm. I was able to have the feel of using paper for scribbling and checking things off while saving on the multiple reprints. My final test will be when I get them back with administrative comments, but it felt really functional.

Now, I just feel dumb because I didn't think to do this a year ago. Hope your comment writing was happy!

Remember that iAnnotate is available for Iolani users, and that your favorite PDF editor (like Notability or some promising looking free ones now available) would work just as well.

P.S. In the week since I started this post, I got my comments back from our administration, and there weren't any errors on it that had to do with this work flow system. There were a couple of other items, but that's another story. :)