Instructor instructions: Copy and paste these instructions into your own course to use with your students. Be sure to review the instructions before posting in your courses. You may want to make adjustments depending on how you plan to assess annotations or due to your specific discipline and/or assignment.

Instructions for students

Purpose: Collaboratively annotating the textbook together will allow us to organize our thinking, build academic vocabulary, summarize main ideas, interpret visuals,  answer questions, and make visible reflections/connections in key sections. You can review a quick-start guide for how to add annotations here.

Instructions: As you review the assigned text section, include at least one annotation for each of the following prompts and tag it with the action/thinking required.

Pre-reading Annotations:

• Read the objective(s)- paraphrase the goal  or ask clarifying questions 
• Figures, Graphs and Charts- select the caption/title and connect it to the text or section topic

During and Post Reading Annotations:

• Vocabulary- write a simple definition for a key term
• Summarize- select a subheading and write a summary of that subsection
• Review Questions- select one question and write an answer
• Citations- check one reference and explain its relevance to the chapter
• Additive Replies- reply on any of the above from your peers with a substantive question or thought

Important notes about annotating: 

• Make sure you hit “Post” after you complete your annotation, or else your annotation will not be saved.
• Make sure it says “Post to [this class]” and not “Post to only me” or else I won’t be able to review your annotations.
• If someone replies to your annotation, you will not receive a notification. Check back periodically to continue the conversation!
• Link to outside resources such as articles, videos, or images (review instructions on how to add an image/link  or videos to annotations).
• Use  the chapter headings or subheadings as additional tags. This will allow all annotators to locate and reply to relevant commentary specific to the assigned section of the textbook . Use the 🔍 tool to search tags or keywords in annotations.