Annotate, Highlight, and Mark Up PDF's With Kami

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

One of the most common tasks that teachers and students look to do when dealing with digital text is to be able to annotate, highlight, and mark-up a document. I personally like to highlight and annotate on paper, it is how I learned to annotate when I was in school.  However, I also really like having my documents available without needing to carry folders or binders with me. It is empowering to be able to access my documents from any device that has internet capabilities. While I like to say we should use less paper instead of being paper-less, there are times when we need our students to interact with text in ways that can be tricky online. For students who struggle with fine motor skills, keeping track of their books, or who benefit from the text to speech features that work with chromebooks, there is a tool that works beautifully.

One of the most popular chrome pdf apps is Kami, which means paper in Japanese. It supports pdfs, documents, and images. The list of tools is vast and includes a PDF and document viewer, highlighter, ability to add notes, underline, and more. Work that is done in Kami can easily be shared with others.   For teachers, Kami is helpful when looking at online resources like e-books and publisher-supplied PDFs. This is a freemium app that has a "teacher plan" with more features.

From KamiHQ.com

Instead of printing or copying worksheets, give Kami a try. To get started, get Kami from the chrome web store.  There is also an OCR tool. OCR stands for optical character recognition and it basically takes the text from PDFs and images and the tool converts the text into an editable format. When the app is open, you can drag and drop the file into the OCR tool and then it is ready to be read and annotated online.

Are you using Kami for PDFs online? Post in the comments section and let me know how it's going!