Screenside Chats feature online practitioners as they discuss their experiences, strategies, and tools building and interacting in pedagogically sound online learning environments.
In this Screenside Chat, IU High School English teacher, Courtney Gaylord, shares how and why she creates “action items” on course content to help students engage meaningfully with the information they are studying.
Please watch the video and then join the conversation below!
I am curious about the social annotations from the teacher’s view. I am currently taking a course from Dr. Itow and we are using Perusall. So, I’m seeing it from the student perspective, but I’m really curious about the teacher side of things. How do you manage all of the annotations from each student? I feel like I would be overwhelmed trying to see every annotation; that could easily become a full time job. How do you manage viewing (and grading) student annotations?
Hi, Chris! I’m in Dr. Itow’s class, too, and I’m experiencing Perusall as a student for the first time…which is making me love it even more. (And I was already a Perusall evangelist!)
Using it as a teacher is exactly as easy as using it as a student, and it requires very little management, actually, because Peruall will grade your students’ annotations for you! I know! Yes! It really does! And it does a heckuva job of it, too. You can read more about their algorithm (which was developed at Harvard) on their site if you’re interested, but, basically, it uses a variety of data points to evaluate students’ annotations in ways that go beyond quantity (although I do think that length makes a difference). You can set the parameters when you create your course and tell it what you want to be the minimum number of annotations and when to release grades to students and whether to grade pass/fail or to score in the standard way, etc. You can even integrate it with your LMS if your school district will allow you to, so it will record the grades for you in your gradebook. To be honest, I use the grading feature as a motivator for my students more than as a serious form of assessment, but my students can see that they are being graded, and, if they try to get away with posting the same comment more than once, they can see that the system is flagging them. It lights a bit of a fire under them–enough to keep them on their toes, anyway.
As for managing their annotations, I don’t even try to read them all. I get notifications from Perusall, and I’ll occasionally pop in if something looks interesting, but, mostly, I pre-annotate the documents (modeling active reading and asking questions), and then I sit back and let the magic happen. 🙂
I love all tools that let me spend more time teaching and less time grading. This totally does that.