I was in a great workshop today from the Hypothesis Customer Success Team on Starter Assignments to get students used to annotating. Clover Park Technical College is a partner campus so we have access to workshops, a campus customer support contact, and other resources. I have been to some of these workshops before and they have always been concise, interesting, and very useful. The presentation is rich with assignment instructions and links to other resources. The workshop went through Hypothesis basics, using starter assignments, and then how to implement this in Canvas (80% of the participants were Canvas users).
I have used social annotation in some of my professional development courses with faculty and elsewhere, but I want to shape them to let faculty know how to get their own students engaged in their readings. Here are some of the things I learned in the workshop that I would implement in my prof dev courses:
- Start by annotating the syllabus. Gives students a low-stakes experience using the annotation tools as well as getting them to think about the syllabus in general.
- Faculty can pre-annotate articles in advance and then include questions about the reading that they can reply to annotations. This models annotation.
- Open the readings for student questions, resources, and connections. Encourage student co-creation of knowledge. Have them link what they are learning to their workplace, home, other classes, or any previous learning.
- Have students annotate study guides by adding links to other media, provide clarifications, ask questions. Students can add videos or images to annotations making readings a multimodal experience.
If you have starter assignments that you use to get your students started with social annotation, feel free to comment below or annotate this blog posting!
