Like it or not, summer’s starting to wind down, and that means one thing for many of us: back to school! Whether you’re looking forward to school or dreading it, you can be more productive this year by using Xodo both inside and outside the classroom. Check out how you can make school stress-free (or to be more realistic, less stressful) with Xodo:

Take notes on lecture slides without printing

On many campuses, students scribbling notes onto printed lecture slides is a common sight. But instead of wasting time and paper, why not just open your slides as PDFs in Xodo? You can swipe through the slides as the lecture goes on, adding notes and highlighting points on the way.

Solve problems and draw diagrams on blank PDFs

Solving a complex differential equation or drawing structural formulas often takes more than one try to get right, resulting in piles of wasted paper. Instead, you can create a blank PDF in Xodo to be your notepad and use the Ink tool to draw or write with your finger or stylus.

With Xodo, you don’t have to be afraid to make mistakes, since you can erase parts of your work with the Eraser tool. Try out Xodo’s range of colors and opacities to make things look the way you want – and if you need to print out your work, you can do that from Xodo.

Leave feedback – for yourself and others

Want to write better essays? It’s important to write well, but it’s equally important to edit well. Remember to edit your work a day or two after writing to ensure that you’re looking at it with fresh eyes. Xodo allows you to circle mistakes, leave suggestions in the margin, and strikeout unnecessary sentences.

If a friend asks you to proofread their work at the last minute, you can open it as a PDF in Xodo, edit, and share via email or whatever medium you want. As long as your friend views your PDF in a standard PDF viewer like Xodo or Acrobat, they’ll see all your annotations and edits.

Keep all your reading in one place

Writing a research paper often means poring over a ton of articles to find ones relevant to your thesis. You can keep your articles in one place by adding them to your bookshelf in the Xodo web app. That way, you can also access them on the go from the Xodo Android app. Annotations are synced across the two apps, so you can pick up right where you left off.

Find the passage you were looking for

If you’ve ever written a research paper, you’ve probably encountered this problem: recalling the perfect quote to prove your point, but not being able to remember where you read it. With Xodo’s new and improved search function, it’s much easier to pinpoint the passage you’re looking for. You can quickly scroll through a list of search results, complete with section headings, page numbers, and surrounding text, to find what you need.

Save ideas from brainstorming sessions

Group projects are the bane of every student’s existence, but they can be a little less painful with Xodo. Brainstorming ideas on a whiteboard is a common way to generate ideas from a group, since having everyone huddled around one notebook or tablet isn’t efficient. At the end of the meeting, take a photo of the whiteboard in Xodo. You can share it with your group members so everyone has access to the ideas you came up with together.

Work together without getting together

Once you’ve completed your portion of a group project, you can use Xodo to share it with your group members. Invite them using their email addresses and they can view your work from their browser and leave you in-context feedback. Now you can get useful feedback without the hassle of coordinating in-person meetings.

Put it all together

Once you have everything you need for your assignment, you can put it all together in the Xodo web app by merging PDFs. Inserting diagrams, supporting articles, and resources is a breeze. Once you’re done, download the merged PDF to your computer to send it to your instructor.

We know that going back to school isn’t something everyone looks forward to, but we hope that these tips will help you out this coming school year. Let us know if there’s any other ways you use Xodo for academic success!

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