Abazigal, thank you for your detailed and thoughtful points.
... perhaps you may want to consider the following points first.
1) How will you collate all their assignments? Email is actually pretty cumbersome.... How you will get the assignments back to them is equally important. You might want to try google classroom for this. The documents submitted will be stored in google drive, so link that to PDF expert for easy offline access.
2) I was trying this with the iPad 3, and I still found the screen too small for me to read and annotate comfortably. You will definitely want the 12.9" iPad Pro in portrait mode.
3) With soft copies, I don't even know if they will look at it, much less read my comments.
Thanks for the detailed response. Here are my thoughts--please let me know if you think this would work....
(1) Rather than e-mail, I was thinking about using our school's online system, Edvance360. Right now, teachers at our university already have students submit their papers in electronic format in an online dropbox. When the due date comes, the teacher clicks a button to export them all as a zip file. I was planning on doing that on my laptop, then dumping the files onto my iPad all at once via iTunes. The Edvance360 program will automatically add the student's names to the file-name along with any prefix I want (like "Essay1" or whatever) to standardize them. I already require my students to submit projects electronically (usually one copy PDF, the other as Word), so I can use Turnitin.com to check for plagiarism before printing out copies, so I don't think that will be any more fuss than it currently is. Mind you, my lads and lasses are all 18+ in age, typically around 21, and are reasonably tech savvy. Returning papers might be the tricky issue or time-consuming part, as that would require e-mailing them individually. If that does prove too time-consuming, I do have an underutilized office worker that I could make do the work of e-mailing and attaching files one at a time.
(2) I understand the desire to have room to read and annotate comfortably. I'm hesitant to use the 12.9 because of weight. I'm a very ambulatory grader, tending to pace up and down the halls as I grade. I have no trouble holding a 9.7 iPad and marking on it as a I walk, but I worry that the 12.9 would make my arm tired, and restrict me to counter-top grading. When I've messed around with drawing and sketching apps, I tended to use the gestural controls to zoom in on the 9.7 iPad so that only 50% of the "page" was visible at a time, then turn the iPad sideways, scrolling up or down if needed as I sketch. That seemed pretty natural to me, so I assumed (mistakenly?) that marking papers would work similarly. Do the PDF viewing programs that allow markup make that difficult in ways I'm unaware of?
(3) I get the desire to have a physical copy to conference with on students, but I'm not sure that students necessarily look at the comments on physically marked-up papers either. I can recall one or two students who merely glance at their grade, then tuck the paper away in their backpacks. For all I know, they may discard it as soon as they get back at their dorms without engaging in the commentary at all. At least with Edvance 360, I have a record of whether the student downloaded and opened the marked-up file--though I still wouldn't have any idea how much time they spent engaged with the commentary.
[doublepost=1494155039][/doublepost]
Try OneNote. It's free and available on every platform. The student sends you the email. You open the PDF and share it to OneNote as a printout. You can make notes both on the a PDF and the page has room on the right side. When you're done, share the page back to email and you're done. You can have a separate notebook, section, or page for each student.
Very interesting. I will give that a gander. Thank you, Jeremiah256.
