How to create PDF files and submit them on Blackboard

A lot of your work in the class this semester will be submitted electronically through Blackboard. There are a lot of advantages to doing it this way over paper. First, you can submit your work when you’re ready rather than having to print it off and wait till Friday to hand it in. It’s also less likely that you’ll lose an electronic file, damage it, have your dog eat it, or forget to print it. Finally, Blackboard allows me to grade your work directly within Blackboard, and all previous versions of your work are kept on file there -- so we can work efficiently when you’re revising work, and you can always see earlier drafts, all in one place.

This document contains instructions on how to submit your work electronically using PDF files, especially focusing on how to convert handwritten work to electronic files -- along with an exercise in doing this process that you’ll be doing during the first week of class.

How to convert handwritten work to PDF

If an assignment doesn’t specifically ask you to type up your work, you are free to either type it up or to handwrite your work on paper or a whiteboard and then convert it into an electronic file that can be turned in on Blackboard. The standard file format we use in this course is the PDF because PDF’s are simple to make and share, and Blackboard allows me to attach annotations and comments to them directly.

There are several different ways to take your handwritten work and get it into PDF format. Here is one process that students in the past have used successfully:

  1. First, download and install a document scanning app to your phone or tablet. There are many such apps available and most of them are free. Popular choices include the following, which are available on iOS and Android: Note Bloc, Office Lens, Genius Scan, Adobe Scan, Scanbot, and Text Fairy. Try a few out and see which one you like the best.
  2. Write up your work on paper or a whiteboard neatly and legibly. It helps to write a little larger than you normally would.
  3. Once your handwritten work is neat, correct, and ready to be graded, use the scanning app to scan the document. PLEASE NOTE: Do not just take a picture of your work with your phone’s camera. Work that is uploaded as an image straight from your camera will not be graded. There are at least two major problems with just taking a picture and not using a scanning app. First, the image is usually too large for Blackboard, which has an upload limit of 100 MB. Second, I cannot add comments or annotations to image files, just PDFs. So again, you must submit PDFs and not some other file format (unless you get permission first).

Different document scanning apps work differently, and you’ll need to experiment to find out which one works best for you. Generally, what happens is that first, the app uses your phone’s camera to take a picture of the document; then the app applies an algorithm to straighten out the image and convert it to a clean PDF; then there’s an option to export the scanned PDF in some way.

Here’s what that looks like using NoteBloc (other apps are similar):

How the handwritten work actually appears (DON’T SUBMIT A PHOTO LIKE THIS!)

After taking the photo using Note Bloc -- notice it auto-detects the edges and angles on the region to capture

The final product, scanned as a PDF -- notice it’s straightened and put into high contrast

Other ways to get handwritten work to PDF include using a desktop scanner to scan the work (these are available in computer labs on campus), or handwriting the work on a tablet using a note-taking app and a stylus.

  1. Once you have a PDF copy of your work, and you’re sure that it’s neatly done and legible, go to the place on Blackboard where the assignment is to be turned in. There is a special icon that indicates an “Assignment” versus a normal document. Here’s an example from another course where the assignment to turn in was called a “Modeling Project”, and there are three of them. Find the assignment you are submitting work for, and click on the link in the title.

  1. Once you click the link in the title, you’ll be taken to a new page with info on the assignment and a place to submit your PDF. Click the button “Browse My Computer” to open your computer’s file explorer, find your file, then upload it.

  1. IMPORTANT: The work is not submitted for grading yet -- just uploaded to the system. To submit the work for grading, you have one more thing to do: Click the button that says “Submit”. Your work is not submitted until you click the button!

Once you’ve clicked Submit, your work is put into a list of work that needs to be graded, and you should be able to see that it has actually been submitted.

How to submit typed-up work on Blackboard as PDF

Simple: Save your typed-up work as PDF (not Word, or other file formats) then follow Steps 4-6 above. If you are unsure how to convert a file to PDF from some other format, you can Google for help or ask on the #tech channel on Campuswire.

PRACTICE

The following is due as part of the Tools assignment.

  1. On a piece of paper or whiteboard, solve the equation . This involves the quadratic formula. If you can only get a few steps in, that’s fine. Just get something written down. The mathematical correctness doesn’t matter here.
  2. Using a scanning app, follow the steps above to convert your work into a neat, legible black-and-white PDF.
  3. Submit your work on Blackboard. This assignment is called “Blackboard submission practice”.

You’ve completed the assignment successfully once you’ve uploaded a neat, legible PDF to Blackboard.

If you have questions about this assignment, please post them on Campuswire in the Class Feed and tag your post with “Startup”

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