Social Annotation Workshop

Problem:

With the switch to emergency remote online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many K-12 and higher education instructors were trying to find more productive ways for collaborative learning in the online space.

Overview:

I was the lead designer and presented for a 45 min. webinar workshop at a practitioner-oriented conference with hands-on learning activities to introduce educators to social annotation technology. My colleague, Grant Chartrand, also contributed and helped present.

To make the webinar more interactive and so that the attendees had something they could refer to after the webinar, I created a hyperdoc in Google Docs. The hyperdoc linked to four activities that we worked through during the workshop. These are listed below.

Social Annotation Workshop Table of Contents

Activity 1 - Annotate a Blog Post

This activity introduced the attendees to social annotation and let them experience it first-hand. It includes instructions—with screenshots—on how to use the social annotation technology Hypothesis.

Annotate a Blog Post

Activity 2 - Explore Social Annotation Analytics Dashboard

In this activity, we explored how an analytic dashboard called CROWDLAAERS (pronounced “crowd layers”) that interfaces with Hypothesis could be useful for seeing a visual representation of student engagement in the social annotations.

Explore Social Annotation Analytics Dashboard

Activity 3 - Personal Implementation Plan

This activity asked instructors to take a few minutes to consider how social annotation might fit into their own courses and to put down their annotation goals or brief implementation plan on one of the Google Slides.

Social Annotation Implementation Plan

Social Annotation Resources

The webinar was only meant to introduce the idea of social annotation and help instructors think about how it might be useful in their own classes. To supplement their learning, I created a list of resources they could go to for more education on social annotation in education settings.

Social Annotation Resources