![annotate article annotate article](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/annotationnewspaper-100913064459-phpapp02/95/annotation-newspaper-3-728.jpg)
You never know what will spark the rest of us to see something new in the text.Īlthough annotation skills can be developed on both print and digital texts (and should probably be practiced in both formats), I prefer to have students work on a printed handout with generous margins - meaning lots of room to write within and around the text. If something in a poem reminds them about a story their grandfather likes to tell at holiday gatherings, great. So I encourage them not only to use traditional annotation practices - such as defining key terms or explaining complex phrases - but also to connect the passage to other contexts or even to their personal lives. The purpose of this activity is to generate themes that students can develop in greater detail in their independent work. Once we have lots of ideas, then we can start discriminating between which ones we think have staying power.” My instructions for this activity are simple: “Your task is to annotate the crap out of this text. I ask students to annotate a short reading, such as a poem or a few paragraphs of a novel. During those weeks of the semester when all the committee chairs decide to schedule meetings during your normal prep time, and your kid has a fever at home, and it’s the 12th week of the spring semester and you are so done with this academic year, it can be a comfort to know that you have a tried-and-true strategy to fill out some unplanned class time on any given day.įor me, the in-class activity that ticks both of those boxes - something that is good for student learning and helps me out when I have minimal prep time - is annotation. Such back-pocket activities also come in handy when teaching-preparation time has been squeezed. When students are struggling to grasp a topic or their attention is lagging, these activities can quickly get things back on track. It might be a quick, five-minute writing task or a more-ambitious, small-group exercise. Have students respond creatively to their reading with their own poetry or prose or visual art as annotations.Most faculty members have a go-to activity that can be deployed at a moment’s notice in the classroom.Have students research a topic or theme and tag and annotate relevant texts across the Internet.Have students explore the Internet on their own with some limited direction (find an article from a respectable source on a topic important to you personally), exercising traditional literacy skills (define difficult words, identify persuasive strategies, etc.).Have students annotate with images and video or integrate images and video into other types of annotations.Have students share their personal opinions on a controversial topic as discussed by an article.Have students mark and explain the use of rhetorical strategies in online articles or essays.Have students identify formal textual elements and broader social and historical contexts at work in specific passages.Have students highlight, tag, and annotate words or passages that are confusing to them in their readings.Have students look up difficult words or unknown allusions in a text and share their research as annotations.Pre-populate a text with questions for students to reply to in annotations or notes elucidating important points as they read.Potential uses from Back to School with Annotations: It also helps add complexity to documents and media by adding an extra layer to them. Annotation is a useful tool to foster interaction, collaboration, and critical thinking.