Comments on: Teaching in the 21st Century: Annotating Text Digitally! https://thedaringenglishteacher.com/teaching-in-21st-century-annotating/ Ideas for middle school ELA and high school English teachers. Engaging and effective ELA lessons and teaching strategies. Fri, 16 Jun 2023 19:22:01 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.2 By: The Daring English Teacher https://thedaringenglishteacher.com/teaching-in-21st-century-annotating/#comment-179 Sun, 16 Oct 2016 04:02:56 +0000 #comment-179 In reply to Teach.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I am glad that you've found my blog, and I hope you come back for more content AND insightful insight.

]]> By: Teach https://thedaringenglishteacher.com/teaching-in-21st-century-annotating/#comment-178 Sat, 01 Oct 2016 07:43:47 +0000 #comment-178 Thank you for writing such a relevant and thoughtful post! As a fellow ELA teacher, I too view close reading, and annotating in particular, as an essential skill for students to acquire and develop. Utilizing annotation strategies helps students strengthen and deepen their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. At the same time, it also helps students build individual capacity, and this not only grows them as learners, but as citizens in a connected, yet complex global society. Through careful and meaningful text-based annotating, students not only learn to understand, analyze, and evaluate what they “read,” but also learn to create their own meaning within their own learning. This makes annotation not just an ELA skill, but a legacy piece in any 21st century curriculum.
Throughout the years, I have had students annotate everything from newspaper articles to songs to books, however none digitally. Annotations were done using pencils, pens, highlighters, and Post-Its. Reading this post, however, spoke to my budding desire to have students annotate texts digitally. It also provided me with a great starting point from which to begin my (and my students’) digital annotation journey. Your three-step process using Xodo is actually perfect for my purposes, as I already use Google Apps for Education in my course. I truly believe digital annotation would also support my efforts to foster a growth mindset in my students (which happens to be a priority of my school). Providing students with a digital platform for annotating would offer them a different option for annotating, as well as provide a swifter way to submit evidence of annotation for grading (for formative assessment purposes), especially for those who need extended time as they could submit digitally. I believe this post links well with your other post, “Why I Accept Latework: Cultivating a Growth Mindset in the Classroom,” as it reveals one content-specific way to support a schoolwide effort, such as attending to the needs of the whole child. In growing the whole child, I encourage my students to practice effective study and work habits. A part of that is providing options for students to re-do/revise their work. Digital annotations fit great into the whole-child educational approach, as it provides an efficient way for students to revisit and re-do their annotations (especially if for a grade), since editing traditional annotations can get quite messy and thereby lose the essence of their effectiveness and thus purpose.

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