Collaborative Annotations

Collaborative annotations can be used to make a reading assignment more engaging and collaborative. Students can see each others' annotations, ask questions, and respond to questions related to the reading material. One strategy for using collaborative annotations is to ask students to annotate the article before contributing to a group discussion.

To set up the assignment, make sure your students have joined their groups in Canvas Links to an external site.. Create a Google doc for each group, and paste the group's reading assignment into the document. Copy the link to share the document Links to an external site. (be sure that settings are set to allow editing) and paste the link into a group discussion. Ask students to annotate the document by adding comments with their thoughts, questions, or replies to group members' annotations. After the whole group has annotated the document, ask the members to post to the group discussion board sharing their thoughts on the reading material and any insight gained through reading their peers' annotations.