My favorite file conversion sites for teachers

How often does this happen to you?

It’s late at night. You have a hard copy of a handout, but you need to modify it for your students. You don’t have the Word file of the document, so you end up wasting your time retyping it.

Up until I found Zamzar, that happened to me a lot.

Zamzar is my favorite file conversion application. It’s free, and it handles nearly every image, document, music, and video format out there.

You don’t even need to register. Just select a file to convert, choose the format you want, and type in your email address. In just a few minutes, your converted file gets emailed to you.

Students love Zamzar, too. Before Google Docs, when essays were due, students would stampede me, desperate to convert their WordPerfect or Works files to Word. Once the word about Zamzar got around campus, the stress declined. Now there are fewer complaints about how our technology is “so old.”

PDF to Word: Better than Zamzar for PDFs
Most popular for teachers, of course, is converting a PDF to doc format. At my school, the administration is notorious for sending out forms for us to use without providing a soft copy. We’re expected to fill them out by hand. I suppose there is a concern we’d modify the form too much.

In this case, I recommend PDF to Word. It’s also free, and it’s better than Zamzar with PDFs. It returns your document with excellent accuracy. I’ve been especially impressed by how well it does with graphics.

Of course, remember the ultimate goal: uploading your converted document to Google Docs. Although it’s another step (scanned hard copy to PDF to Word document to Google Doc), now you can share your file with others.