Guiding student learning with annotations
We all want to succeed the first time with our educational technology tools, but this rarely happens. There is often room to improve.
When annotating a given course text, some students will contribute less than ideal annotation output. How can instructors help those students?
- What kind of scaffolding can be provided to enhance student comfort and metacognition?
- How can consumption of pre-existing annotations on given text enhance student learning?
- How can tagging be implemented to help both instructors and students?
Scaffolding student annotation output
Phoebe Jackson via the Saltise initiative, has produced a useful instructor-to-student briefing on how to write high quality annotations. These are typically going to be annotations that "clarify, connect, or extend" the material at hand.
If you are implementing annotation in your course for the second time, sharing examples of last year's previous high quality and poor quality annotations with the current group of students can be a great start. Get students to consider what makes an annotation high quality -- this should give them a metacognitive nudge. This may have some dependence on your subject area and the goals of your annotation assignments, but typically clarity and specificity are winning attributes of an annotation.
If understanding the reading is a goal of annotation in your classroom, students will need to be clear about what they do and do not understand. Instead of a student making an annotation of "I don't get topic X", it's better for them to be specific about what it is that they don't understand. That way directed help can occur, and discussions are likely to get to a contructive place more quickly.
Pre-existing annotations for learning
There is great value in students going through the hard work of meaning-making on a given text through collaborative annotation. However, one can also consider texts where professionals have made guided annotations to help scaffold student learning. This is the approach of the Science in the Classroom initiative, where scientific professionals have made annotations to define key technical terms and make connections to other relevant work. Annotated papers also include news and policy links in “lenses” that can be toggled on and off.
Tagging
Both hypothes.is and Perusall allow users to include tags in their annotations, just as one would use a #hashtag in a social media platform. This can help organize subsequent discussion, or enable more organized searching of a body of annotation content, as students search for the tags that interest them.
For example your students could tag their annotations with:
- #Comment
- #Question
- #Errata
- #Confusing
- or any #instructor-derived tag to organize their output
Instructors and students can search among these tags to organize their consumption.
A "Just in time teaching" approach can help you to tailor your in-person teaching more effectively to clear up misconceptions about the supplied reading. With this tagging approach students have already annotated what they found #confusing. What a help to the instructor!!!!
See how Shaveen Singh used this tagging approach in his annotation research paper: Exploring the Potential of Social Annotations for Predictive and Descriptive Analytics.
Why is all of this important?
An edtech tool is only as good as its implementation.........the above should give instructors a boost in how they can help their students to learn more effectively through the production and consumption of annotations.