Social Annotation: Making Reading Visible and Thinking Collaborative
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.
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.
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.
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.