What does Paced Social Annotation do?
What’s included in the early release?
A new assignment mode
You can still create traditional Hypothesis readings, now called “Social Annotation”. Our new feature is an additional assignment mode, called “Paced Social Annotation”.
The ability to hide and reveal student annotations
With this new mode, instructors can start assignments with student annotations hidden from other students. Instructors will be able to view and reply to student annotations, but otherwise these annotations will stay invisible to other students until the instructor reveals them.
When revealed, the whole class (or group, if using the LMS Groups/Sections integrations) can see their peers’ annotations made up to this point, plus any previously-hidden instructor replies.
What other functionality is coming soon?
We’re integrating Paced Social Annotation with our auto-grading feature, which should be released this fall. We’ll also be adding the ability for students to opt-in to assignment notifications at a future date.
How do I contact someone at Hypothesis about this feature?
Please reach out to our Support team!
Why do I want to use Paced Social Annotation?
Scaffolding annotation
Paced Social Annotation allows instructors to get more original comments from students on their first pass, and then allows students to compare their comments with others on subsequent read-throughs. The initial student pass can still be supported by visible instructor annotations, but won’t contain their peers’ notes. Depending on your goals, instructors can stop here without revealing student annotations.
The instructor can also choose to reveal student annotations to the whole class at any point. Students can compare the text they annotated with the annotations of other students and reply to each other. Whether you’re introducing social annotation strategies or the acquisition of difficult academic topics, these incremental steps can be part of a scaffolding strategy in the classroom.
Encouraging student rereads and conversations
Even when we want students to check back in with a text several times over the course of an assignment, some students may wait until the last minute to provide their annotations or feel a single pass was sufficient to complete their objectives.
By setting up different time periods for annotations and replies, students return to the text after their peers have created annotations so they have more to reply to. They’re also creating replies around the times their peers do, making it easier to see the benefits of building habits that produce more involved conversations in the text. Building the habit of returning to a text is also helpful for getting students rereading the text and creating new comments on a second pass, whether over difficult sections of the text the class initially avoided, or with a new purpose that differs from the original pass.
1:1 instructor to student private annotation
Revealing annotations in a Paced Social Annotation reading is optional. With this new feature instructors can build a 1:1 (student and instructor) assignment with a few clicks of our new setup options.
A step by step guide to using Paced Social Annotation
Setting up the assignment
1) Create a new assignment, or edit an existing assignment.
2) Select “Paced Social Annotation”.
3) Select the Manual Checkpoint option (a Checkpoint is when hidden annotations become revealed).
4) Optionally, select a Due Date (this will be used by our upcoming Auto-grading integration).
5) Select the document you want Hypothesis to display
From this point you follow the usual steps for creating a Hypothesis-enabled reading.
- Using the Hypothesis LMS App With Assignments in Canvas
- Creating Hypothesis-Enabled Readings in D2L Brightspace
- Creating Hypothesis-Enabled Readings in Moodle
- Creating Hypothesis-Enabled Readings in Blackboard Learn Original
- Creating Hypothesis-Enabled Readings in Blackboard Ultra
While the assignment is in progress
What instructors can see:
You’ll see the document you selected and annotations in the Hypothesis Sidebar. In addition, Paced Social Annotation readings will also have a top bar that shows the checkpoint type (“Manual”), the selected Due Date, and a “Reveal annotations” button.
What students can see:
Students will see the instructor-selected document, the Hypothesis Sidebar, and a top bar that tells them the Hidden or Revealed status of their annotations and the Due Date.
When you are ready to reveal student annotations
As an instructor, click the “Reveal annotations” button in the top bar.
How to give feedback on this early release feature
We welcome your feedback! To give us feedback on this feature:
- Create a Hypothesis web app account (or log into your web app account, if you already have one). We recommend using our Chrome extension if you use a Chromium browser (Chrome, MS Edge, Brave, etc).
- Join our new feedback group here.
- Activate the web app, change over to the feedback group, and annotate this page! Remember, the web app has a Public group, for this activity we’d prefer you stay in our private feedback group.