Digital projects and assignments

Annotation is a useful tool to foster interaction, collaboration, and critical thinking. It also helps add complexity to documents and media by adding an extra layer to them. 

Potential uses from Back to School with Annotations:

• Pre-populate a text with questions for students to reply to in annotations or notes elucidating important points as they read.
• Have students look up difficult words or unknown allusions in a text and share their research as annotations.
• Have students highlight, tag, and annotate words or passages that are confusing to them in their readings.
• Have students identify formal textual elements and broader social and historical contexts at work in specific passages.
• Have students mark and explain the use of rhetorical strategies in online articles or essays.
• Have students share their personal opinions on a controversial topic as discussed by an article.
• Have students annotate with images and video or integrate images and video into other types of annotations.
• Have students explore the Internet on their own with some limited direction (find an article from a respectable source on a topic important to you personally), exercising traditional literacy skills (define difficult words, identify persuasive strategies, etc.).
• Have students research a topic or theme and tag and annotate relevant texts across the Internet.
• Have students respond creatively to their reading with their own poetry or prose or visual art as annotations.

Hypothes.is uses annotation to enable sentence-level note taking or critique on top of classroom readings, news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more. The tool was designed to be open, neutral, and lasting. Annotations can include text, images, links, and videos. 

How-to guides and documentation:

Timeline.ly

Timeline.ly allows users to annotate YouTube videos with text, images, other videos, and voice recordings. 

How-to guide:

Genial.ly

Genial.ly allows user to create a variety of visual projects including annotated images. Images can be annotated with text, videos, other images, and links. The platform has a free version that should be enough for class projects.

Scalar

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar has a robust annotation system that allows users to annotate text, images, video. 

How-to guide:

DYK that annotation has been used as a teaching tool in physics, English, physical education, literature, medicine, biochemistry, and more?