Essential PDF Tools for Education

Xodo provides an online tool for filling out and signing interactive PDF forms. Just upload your file, fill in required form fields, and download the finished document. If you are working with paper documents turned into digital files by scanning (where form fields are just part of an image placed on top of a PDF), Xodo’s got you covered. Load your scanned form into Xodo’s PDF editor and open up the Fill and Sign tab. From there, you’ll be able to insert free text, crosses, ticks, dots, stamps, dates, and signatures anywhere on the PDF page.

Open your file in Xodo’s Redact PDF tool and start marking content for redaction. You can do that by either choosing text directly or drawing a selection rectangle around a region you’d like to redact. Click the Redact All button when ready. Xodo will then permanently remove all items selected for redaction. Tip: You can mark additional content for redaction by keyword search or patterns (phone numbers, emails, credit cards). Choose items from search results and click the Add Mark button. Your selection will appear in the Marked for Redaction list and you can then proceed to apply your redaction. Being able to redact sensitive information from within students’ records is essential for anyone working in an educational institution. Xodo’s redaction tool can help you stay in compliance with legal requirements to protect students’ privacy and identity under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Educational materials are traditionally distributed as printed documents. This fact alone makes proper archival difficult and troublesome. Digitization procedures can make archival easier and mitigate the risks, but only if you have the right tools at your disposal. You can use Xodo mobile apps to scan physical documents with your smart, portable device. Then, you can use the OCR converter to extract content from image-based documents into formats you can easily edit or copy/paste. To properly archive your digital documents, you need to convert them into PDF/A file format, designed specifically for that purpose. PDF/A gives you the ability to open your documents anytime in the future and protects them from corruption. Additionally, you can compress PDFs ready for digital archiving to save valuable disk space and also redact sensitive information to prevent revealing students’ personal information when you need to retrieve and share those archived documents.

Use Xodo’s annotation tools inside the powerful PDF editor to give feedback, make notes, pose additional questions, and much more. Highlight, underline, strike through, and add squiggles to text, post a note with a comments section, add free text, or draw a rectangle to explain everything you need quickly and efficiently.

The Sign PDF tool by Xodo lets you create and add signatures to PDF documents in three easy steps. Open, sign, and download your finished document.