What is the best way to send/post documents for my students?
The best thing to do with your documents prior to posting is converting it to a PDF. With Word documents, a lot of the times, when you save your document, other data is saved along with what you have on your document. This might occur when you have multiple word documents open at one time, or if you have been working on a previous document. When you save your document, it saves it to Microsoft’s memory, and sometimes saving might transfer whatever was in the memory to your document. Sometimes you’ll notice it, sometimes you won’t. While posting on the web, I wouldn’t recommend saving it as a word document, because some students might not have MS Word (for example, if they’re using a MAC), plus a lot of that unseen saved data could still transfer over when you post (which might explain the gibberish or random mark up that appears on your document).
HTM is a better alternative than posting a Word document. But it isn’t the best. If you try to go to “Save As” in MS Word and save it as a webpage, other things get saved as HTM underneath the code. If you try to view the code, you’ll see a lot of extra stuff that MS Word inserts.
The best thing to do is convert it to PDF and post it. Converting it to PDF eliminates a lot of that gibberish and extra data. Plus Adobe Reader is free to download, getting rid of that “what if students didn’t have Word on their computer” problem.
Don’t have Adobe Acrobat to convert your documents to PDFs? Not a problem, check out this article about free PDF creators available: