For teachers
PDF tools for teachers
Teaching runs on assembled documents: a worksheet pack from four sources, the six pages of a textbook a class actually needs, slides turned into a handout. The limit that matters is the photocopier budget and the school firewall, and neither is helped by a site that uploads your files.
By Suprabhat Updated How we write these
What tends to go wrong
- Materials get assembled from several sources every week, and doing it by hand each time is the task that gets dropped.
- Printing budgets are real, and a deck printed one slide per page burns through a term’s allowance.
- School networks block plenty of sites, often including the free PDF tools, and installing software is usually not an option.
- Anything sent home has to open on a parent’s phone without an app or an account.
The workflow
Every one of these works today, and runs on your own device.
- 1
Build a worksheet pack from several sources
Combine a starter, the main exercise, an extension task and the mark scheme into one document in teaching order — so the pack is one file to print, one to upload to the VLE, and one to find again next year.
Merge PDF - 2
Take only the pages the lesson needs
Pull six pages out of a textbook scan instead of handing out the whole thing. Smaller to share, quicker to print, and the class is not hunting for page 214.
Extract PDF Pages - 3
Cut the printing bill
Two, four or six pages per sheet, with the margins kept sensible so it stays readable. On a thirty-slide deck for a class of thirty this is the difference between 900 sheets and 150.
Multiple Pages per Sheet - 4
Take the answers out before the class gets it
Remove the mark scheme pages from a resource pack and save the student version separately. Keep the original and you have both, generated from one file.
Delete PDF Pages - 5
Share a deck that opens anywhere
A PowerPoint sent home is a file half the families cannot open. As a PDF it opens on every phone, tablet and school device, with the fonts and layout exactly as you set them.
PowerPoint to PDF - 6
Fit it under the VLE upload limit
Learning platforms and parent-mail systems cap attachments, frequently at 5 MB or 10 MB. A scanned pack shrinks a long way without becoming unreadable on the printouts.
Compress PDF
Why a browser tool suits a school network
Two practical reasons, both about the constraints schools actually have rather than about privacy in the abstract.
Safeguarding is the third. Anything with pupil names, photographs or assessment data on it should not be uploaded to a free service, and here it is not: the document is read by the page in front of you and never sent anywhere.
- Nothing to install. It is a web page, so it works on a locked-down staff laptop, an interactive whiteboard PC and a Chromebook trolley without a software request.
- It keeps working offline. After the first visit the tools are cached, so a dead connection in a mobile classroom does not stop you assembling a pack.
Questions
Is this suitable for documents with pupil data on them?
Yes, and it is the reason to prefer it. Files are processed inside the browser tab and never uploaded, so a mark sheet or a document carrying pupil names is not sent to a third party at all.
Will it work on the school network?
It is a single web page with no plugin and no upload traffic, so it behaves like any other site. Because it also works offline after the first load, a restrictive network is less of a problem than it would be for an uploading tool.
Can I make a worksheet fillable on screen?
Not here — building form fields is not something this site does. It can flatten a form someone else made so the answers become permanent, which is the useful half for collecting completed work.
How do I put several pages on one sheet without shrinking the text too far?
Two-up keeps text comfortably readable for most handouts; four-up is fine for slides with large type and poor for dense worksheets. Preview before committing a class set to the printer.
More in Merge & Organize PDF Pages, or browse every tool.