Teacher Testimonials

Teachers have known the value of having students annotate texts for a long time. It’s a natural progression to annotate text online. What I like about Hypothes.is is the ability for my students and I to annotate the open web and share our thoughts with anybody.

– Chris Sloan, English Teacher, Judge Memorial Catholic High School

No matter what I teach–poems, essays, fiction–I want students to learn the profits and pleasures of careful, engaged reading. To cultivate this kind of reading and learning, I’ve tried a lot of previous annotation tools but Hypothes.is finally delivers on the promise of digital annotation. Its clean, flexible interface makes it both easy and powerful for students.  Its support for multimedia annotation and syndication opens creative ways for students to represent their reading experience and for teachers to understand and work with student response. Hypothes.is opens the doors to the networked scriptorium.

– Larry Hanley, English Professor, San Francisco State

From finding key moments to highlighting unfamiliar words. From character analysis to questioning evidence. From analyzing rhetorical appeals to online peer revision. The boundaries of annotating are limited only by the learners’ and facilitator’s lack of imagination. Hypothes.is is a long awaited tool to engage and encourage collaborative interaction with online text.

– Janelle Bence, English Teacher, New Tech High School @Coppell

Hypothesis has completely transformed my teaching this year. My students thoroughly enjoy the social aspect of annotating texts this way, and have delved more deeply into their readings as they respond to each other in the margins. I’ve loved that they have traded ideas with students from other universities and even other fields when we have run into them on a common reading.

– Robin DeRosa, English Professor, Plymouth State University

I love that hypothes.is allows my students to contribute to the conversation whether they are frequent class participants or the type that like to sit back and think before responding. I can’t call on every student but by annotating together we can all join in the conversation.

– Sarah Gross, English Teacher, High Technology High School

Hypothesis provides a tangible framework for students to enter the proverbial “conversation” bandied about in education textbooks for decades. Without much prompting my students have engaged with their readings in ways I had only hoped: making connections between texts, responding to each other’s ideas, and working beyond word requirements.

– Grant Schubert, Composition Instructor, Rock Valley College

Our use of hypothes.is…has helped (and forced, some of them have told me, happily) students to read more carefully and more deeply. They are helping each other make sense of the readings before they even get to class, which means that the small amount of time for discussion is better spent on real analysis work, evaluating arguments, comparing texts. When we get to class they already have an idea of how others are thinking and what others’ questions are, and discussion ends up being an extension of those ongoing conversations.

– Jasmine Ma, Professor of Education, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Hypothes.is helped my students construct collaborative and layered meanings of texts, allowing for multiple close readings, as well as external and multimedia links and annotations. Students can begin to form arguments, as well as provide information for me as to what should be explored further in class. Most interesting for me were those parts of the text that the students didn’t annotate, allowing for the opportunity to confront challenging passages.

– Lee Skallerup Bessette, Instructional Technology Specialist, University of Mary Washington

Digital technologies continue to seem like ‘an extra’ in the classroom given the demands of content and standards—which often don’t include such technologies…Hypothes.is combines teachers’ need to engage with content and cover standards with the 21st Century skill of reading online.

– Ann David, Professor of Education, University of the Incarnate Word