https://anchor.fm/hitechpod/embed/episodes/12--Digital-Annotation--Perusall-e10cm53

This Week's App: Perusall

What is Perusall?

Perusall is a digital annotation tool that will allow you and your students to annotate Word documents, PDFs, images, videos, and more.

It is built to reinforce an academic context from the get-go. Of course, you could just use it for your own annotations but it has assignment, gradebook, and class roster features built-in that help you manage an annotation experience as a learning activity. Perusall is first a free tool: there is no requirement or freemium model that will eventually require you to pay up. Their paid features relate to publisher integrations and institutional licenses that support Learning Management System integrations. For you and your classroom, everything is free!

What can it be used for?

For free, Perusall requires that you bring all of the content. You can upload a large variety of media types: even podcasts. When you assign it to students, they enter into a document / media player that shows them the media and provides them the suite of annotation tools. Students can comment, highlight, and interact with one another.

Students can comment, highlight, and interact with one another.

It allows anonymous interactions and voting systems for students. An especially helpful feature is that students can annotate text one word at a time or they can highlight any space in the document (like a graph or image) to make an annotation anywhere. They are not limited to the lines of paragraph. In videos, the comments are made on the timeline so students will see whatever comment or question is made when and where their peers made it. This feature ensures that every annotation happens in context.

How do I get started?

Head on over to Perusall.com and get your free account. After you've registered, check out Perusall's great "getting started" guide.

It will walk you through creating a course, adding media to your course, creating assignments, setting course policies. Once you have these set up pieces in place, you'll invite your students into the course and get started. What we want to be sure you consider is the pedagogical purpose: the technological requirements are fairly straightforward.

However, annotation is a powerful practice when used effectively. Requiring students to use it like a discussion board or like a soapbox is not as helpful.

• Encourage them to first bring their thoughts and personality to it.
• Challenge them to follow citations back to the original work and provide whatever context from the cited piece to what you're working on.
• Provide some measure of grade to the experience, whether it is its own grade or a part of a participation grade.
• Model how they should interact with one another: ask them questions; provide clarifications.
• Highlight certain areas but provide no explanation as to why: require the students to posit why you might have highlighted the content.

Any or all of these ideas will help engender good discourse and critical analysis. Have fun annotating!