Using a Skriva stylus on an iPad opens up lots of different ways of interacting with documents and files that perhaps you haven’t thought of before. As a teacher, I quite often send a PDF document to my students and get them to annotate it or add more information using their stylus. Here in the Files app, I’ve got a simple PDF document that I’ve made for this demo, with a passage of text about lions. At the bottom, you’ll see I’m asking my students to highlight the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in three different colours.

With my Skriva stylus, I can simply tap on the screen, and the markup tools will appear. From here, I’m going to use the highlighter tool. Tapping on it a second time will then let me change the size of my pen. I’m just going to experiment for a second and see if this brush is the right size. I think a bit smaller might be good, so I’ll tap on the icon again, choose a smaller size, and then test it. Yes, perfect. Let’s just quickly drop the opacity a little bit so I can see the original writing behind. Yes, I think I’m ready to go.

My students and I can simply choose the colour we want to use, and then we can go through and read the text, highlighting the keywords as instructed. Of course, this is just one simple example of highlighting different types of words, but you can imagine how you could use this in your classroom. You could highlight prime numbers below 100, or all the times tables of five in a number grid. You could do lots of different things just using that highlighter tool on a PDF document.

When you or your student are finished with the annotation, all you need to do is press the Done button in the top corner, and that will save the PDF document straight back to Files. From here, I can tap and hold, press Share, and then get the students to send it back to me in whatever way they want to, whether that’s through AirDrop, Showbie, or Google Classroom. It will all work, and it will send it back to me as a PDF document with all of their annotations embedded in the file.