Good morning,
I hope everyone is doing okay after the storm! Today’s tip is something that can be done asynchronously and has interesting potential for many different disciplines. Let’s look at digital annotation.
Digital annotation can take many forms—embedding media, commenting on timestamps in videos, etc. Some annotations become a part of scholarship, tying into the idea of scholarship as conversation. For this newsletter, I’m focusing on written annotation, where readers comment on an online document such as a PDF or webpage. By having students annotate, you allow them the opportunity to engage with a text more closely. (See this Cult of Pedagogy post for some examples of how other teachers have used annotation in their classes.)
Canvas has its own form of digital annotation through the Student Annotation assignment type. When you set up an annotation assignment, you upload a document that students can then annotate through a SpeedGrader-like interface.
You could upload a graphic organizer due before or after class, for example.
In the past, I’ve had students annotate my syllabus, but I could see it being useful for annotating a poem or short story, an abstract, or even a short paragraph about a concept you’ve covered in class.
To set up a Student Annotation assignment, create an assignment like usual, select the Online Submission Type, then check “Student Annotation” as an Online Entry Option. You’ll need to upload a file for students to annotate in the section that appears.
The Student Annotation assignment type is private, meaning that only you see a student’s annotations. This can help to create a space where students feel comfortable, which is especially important for readings with challenging themes. That said, if you want to share annotations more broadly, you could use a tool like Hypothesis to annotate websites—including those on your course.
Hypothesis offers a Chrome extension that allows you to highlight and annotate text online. The downside is that these annotations are public—anyone with the URL and the extension can view. It’s like graffiti, or a guest book, with folks who’ve visited before leaving something behind. That can be its own reward, but it can also make for a space that feels less comfortable!
If you use Hypothesis as an overlay on your course, you get the best of both worlds—allowing students to annotate course materials with other students being able to see, but also shutting down public traffic. (If you try to view the URL while not logged it, it will redirect to the login page.) As only students in a course can access the course URLs, you have already narrowed down your audience.
Note the highlighted text and the annotation comment—a question—that connects to the course page.
There isn’t an LTI connection between Canvas and Hypothesis, as that’s a paid feature, but Hypothesis itself is free to try. Additionally, if you’re less concerned with whole-class annotation, then the Annotation assignment type can allow for even online students to show their work in a different way beyond Word comments or uploaded photos.
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