What Is It?
Social annotation and polling are interactive tools that can significantly enhance engagement and participation in online classes. Social annotation is a digital approach that allows students to collaboratively comment, highlight, and discuss content (e.g., articles, PDFs, videos) directly within the learning material itself. Polling involves posing questions to your students and then evaluating how the class as a whole has answered.
Why Use Social Annotations and Polling?
- Including Social Annotations and/or Polling alongside course content increases the likelihood students will consume the content (and actually understand it!).
- Assigning social annotation turns a typically passive and isolated activity–reading–and makes it visible and engaging.
- Replacing quizzes with polls allows you to check understanding while reducing student anxiety. Students aren't graded on whether they're right or wrong, so they don't have to stress about it. Additionally, they can see how classmates have answered, so they know they’re not the only ones confused about something.
Watch Our Half-hour Webinar on Polling and Annotation
How to Add a Graded Poll or Annotation Assignment
- For PDF Annotations, see Graded PDF Annotations. Note: There are sections for both Canvas and other Learning Management Systems.
- For Standalone Polls, see:
General Tips and Strategies for Polling
Use polls to check for understanding.
Polls help you see at a glance, and without a laborious grading burden, whether your students have picked up the key concepts in a reading or video.
Intersperse polls with content.
Harmonize allows you to intersperse polls and content. That means you can place poll questions directly after the text or videos relevant to those questions.
Use polls to take the temperature.
After readings or videos, ask students how well they understood the content. Students will be more likely to answer honestly since the polls are anonymous, and you can quickly see what content will need more attention.
General Tips and Strategies for PDF Annotation
Explain the purpose for the annotation activity.
Have a clear purpose for the annotation activity in mind and explain it to your students. Annotation activities have tons of learning potential but can feel like busy work if students don’t understand the purpose.
Give clear instructions for annotation.
Don’t cut students loose; give them clear instructions. Tell them how many comments and replies to post (just like in a regular discussion). Consider suggesting word count ranges and telling them what kinds of comments and replies they can leave.
Invite students to cite peers’ comments in papers.
Treat the conversation around the reading as the “scholarly conversation” in which your students will make an intervention. This is a great way to get younger writers used to the ideas of (and rhetorical moves associated with) “conversation” and “intervention.” As a bonus, this rewards students for paying attention to their peers’ comments and really engaging with them.
Annotate course documents.
Consider turning course documents–such as your syllabus or the assignment packet for a major project or research paper–into PDFs so your students can annotate them. Assign students to ask a question, share something they’re excited about, or identify something that might be challenging.
Leave bread crumbs.
Consider adding a few annotations to the text before students come in. Maybe add some Socratic questions, gloss a difficult passage, and/or add an example of the kind of comment you want to see. Don’t go overboard, though: these comments won’t “stick” from semester-to-semester.
Specific Ideas for Annotations
| Assignment | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Agree or Disagree | For articles, essays, and book chapters with clear arguments and perspectives, ask students to identify something they agree or disagree with and explain why. | Students love when you ask their opinions! Bonus: you uncover misunderstandings if the thing they agree or disagree with isn’t actually what the author is saying. |
| Ask a Discussion Question | Have students pose a question about the reading to their peers. Essentially, your students are embedding discussion questions within the text. Let students know how much you love it when their questions spark a lot of discussion. | Students are more engaged when they’re interested in the discussion, and you’ll find students have a great pulse on what questions their peers find interesting. |
| Ask an Instructor Question | Let students ask you questions about the text, especially if it’s a difficult one. Consider asking them to tag you on these questions. | Your answers to these questions will be visible to all students right at the “muddy” points in the text. |
| Make a Connection | Ask students to connect the reading to something personal, to another reading in the class, to a current event, or to something they already know. | Students are more invested in discussions that are relevant to their lives. And learning science suggests students need to connect new knowledge to prior knowledge. |
| Summarize a Paragraph | For essays, have each student choose a paragraph to summarize in 1-2 sentences. | This creates an outline of the article in the students’ own words. |
| Complete Pre-writing Activities | For primary texts, have students practice whatever skill you’re learning, whether it’s analyzing language, applying secondary sources, or identifying patterns, themes, and symbols. | Students can return to their annotations later as they begin brainstorming and drafting for essays and projects. |
Further Reading
- “Real-time polling to help corral university-learners' wandering minds” by Trevor John Price
- “When I saw my peers annotating” by Jeremiah H. Kalir, Esteban Morales, Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin
- “Reading and connecting: using social annotation in online classes” by Xinran Zhu, Bodong Chen, R. Avadhanam, Hong Shui, Raymond Zhang