Collaborative annotation involves students working together to annotate a resource.
Instructions
- Provide students with a resource and have them break into small groups.
- In their groups, get students to add annotations to the resource, such as highlighting key points, asking questions, making connections and providing insights.
Tip
To prevent the activity from becoming overly lengthy, put constraints on the activity, such as a set time limit and a set number of particular things to look for and comment on.
Resources
Printed copies of the resource, highlighters, pens.
Variations
- Make it student-driven: Ask students what they would like to know from the materials, note their responses where all the students can see them and have students search for those things in the material.
- Make it flipped: Instead of having this activity during the class, educators can make it a low-stakes group reading assignment and only facilitate discussion during the class.
- Make it shared: Instead of printing the resource, have it as a shared document that all groups are working in. Encourage students to respond to other groups’ annotations.
References
Leveraging Annotation Activities and Tools to Promote Collaborative Learning (columbia.edu)
Collaborative Annotation Tools – Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation (utoronto.ca)
Social annotation | Center for Teaching Innovation (cornell.edu)