Word on the street is that they’re going to permit us, the lowly elementary teachers, to make our own scannable assessments this fall!!! (Middle school and high school teachers have already been able to do this for a year.) In preparation for this, I’m starting to scan some social studies items so my students can be assessed on Document-Based Questions. But I really didn’t know what to do, step by step, and since I use a non-district-supported Mac, I couldn’t go to my IT department. I mean, I’m COMPLETELY AWARE you can just open the PDF then take a screen capture of the image you want, but I wanted to preserve the quality of the scan as much as possible.
So if you’re in the same boat as me, here’s a step by step guide to scanning your current hard-copy assessments in and getting them ready to be turned into a Pinnacle assessment.
1. Scan in each page of your current assessment. If you can scan them in as JPGs, then you’ll just be able to crop the image out of each page, then re-save. Mine were scanned in as PDFs, so there are a few extra steps.
2. Open the PDF in preview.
3. Use the selection tool to capture the image you want to save. Go to Edit, Copy.
4. In the File window, open “New from Clipboard.” This option won’t be available unless you copy your image!
5. Go to File, Save As.
6. Make sure you change the format of your document from PDF to JPG.
All done! Not too bad, if you didn’t have to spend 384925671254 minutes trying to figure out how to get a high-quality image. That’s what I’m here for friends, asking the stupid computer questions so you don’t have to.