Collaborative annotation tools allow students to highlight and add notes to a text or diagram to explain their understanding, ask questions, and reply to each other's notes.

Hypothes.is

You and your students can use the Hypothesis app in Canvas to collaboratively highlight and annotate internet resources or PDFs without leaving the learning management system. All users can reply to each other's annotations. Users can also create unanchored annotations without selecting any particular text within a document.

Purpose

Annotation tools are useful to implement supportive and dialogical teaching strategies.

Supportive strategies provide the conditions for higher-order thinking and exchange. The role of the instructor is to design and organize instruction and be a facilitator, guide, coach, and mentor. Strategies include scaffolding and coaching.
Dialogical strategies should engage students in discourse. Strategies include coaching, articulation, multiple perspectives, and collaboration.

Creative Ideas

Teachers can guide students' reading by calling attention to key parts of a text or to pose questions for students to reply to.
Teachers can direct students to identify textual features (word choice, repetition, imagery, metaphor, etc.) or relevant broader contexts (historical, biographical, cultural, etc.) for passages of a text.
Have students highlight, tag, and annotate words or passages that are confusing to them in their readings and the instructor or other students respond.
Have students select a passage and elaborate by providing an analogy or association.
Have students mark and explain the use of rhetorical strategies in online articles or essays.
Have students annotate with images and video to express associations.
Have students share their personal opinions on a controversial topic as discussed by an article.
Have students role-play by annotating in the voice of another person or a character from a novel.
Have students look up difficult words or unknown allusions in a text and share their research as annotations.
Have students identify claims and select pieces of evidence from a document for analysis.
Have students link to internet resources to build a bibliography for a topic.

Tutorials

Hypothesis Canvas App Guide - condensed by Liz (PDF)

Hypothes.is Site

10 Ways to Annotate with Students

Quick Start Guide for Students

Annotation Tips for Students

Creating a Private Group

Annotating with Groups

Examples

Click the Next button below to see 3 examples of the Hypothesis integration in Canvas.

Alternative

Diigo

Bookmarks and tags: It’s one of the most commonly used free web annotation tools which lets you bookmark and tag web pages. Its advanced search allows you to rummage through the text of pages you have bookmarked which includes tags, titles, URLs and even your own comments and highlights.

Highlighting & annotation: Highlight a part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to it. Comment on other users’ notes which can be set to either public or private.

Chrome extension: Once you install the Diigo chrome extension, you will see its icon displayed at the upper right hand of your screen. When it’s clicked, you’ll see the dropdown menu from which you can choose what action to do.

Canvas integration: no