Wanna Copy and Paste from a PDF? Kami to the Rescue!

 

To quote Peter Griffin, "You know what really grinds my gears?", not being able to copy and paste from a PDF. Many times, we teachers are given resources in PDF form. When we go to adapt it for how we plan to teach, trying to copy and paste content from PDFs can be problematic. The same is true for students. 

This school year, in teaching history, I placed a greater emphasis on having students cite quotes and textual evidence from primary sources. More often than not, the primary sources were sent to students as a PDF file. Students complained how problematic it was to tab switch or try to memorize text when quoting a source. 

One way to alleviate this annoying pain point, for both teachers and students, is to use OCR technology? OCR stands for optical character recognition. This gives you the ability to pull text from an image and make it editable. Most PDF files are scanned images of text. OCR can make the text of a scanned PDF editable. For teachers and students who want to copy and paste snippets of text from a PDF, they can use the OCR function built in to Kami. This function is available in the free version of Kami as well as paid.

Start by opening a PDF either in Google Drive or Google Classroom. Click the Open with button. In the drop down menu that appears, click Annotate with Kami.

When the PDF opens up in Kami, in the top right corner, click the "hamburger" or three lines menu. In the drop down that appears, click OCR For Scanned PDFs. 

Give it a minute to process. At the bottom of the page, you'll see a small pop up saying Running OCR. The page will reload when it's finished running.

When the page reloads, using the Kami Select tool (found on the top of the left side toolbar), select a snippet of text just as you would on a web page or Google Doc. Right click in the selected area and click Copy. You can then paste the snippet of text anywhere you need to use it. 

Teachers! The next time you get some great PDF resources from a PD or workshop and want to use that information in planning a lesson, be sure to rock the OCR function in Kami. Show your students this skill to help them identify textual evidence as part of a lesson and or writing process. How will you use the Kami OCR function?