Annotation Tools are a suite of academic technologies that allow faculty and students to highlight, comment on, and engage directly with digital texts, PDFs, and web pages. These tools facilitate active reading and social annotation, encouraging deeper engagement with course materials outside of class. They also provide instructors with robust features for providing detailed feedback on student assignments.
Key Features and Benefits of Annotation Tools:
- Enables multiple users (students/instructors) to highlight and comment on the same digital document, fostering discussion directly within the text.
- Active Reading & Comprehension: Helps students move from passive consumption to active engagement by documenting their thoughts and questions as they read.
- Detailed Digital Feedback: Allows instructors to provide personalized, in-line comments, drawings, and track changes on student submissions (e.g., on PDFs or MS Word documents).
Adobe Acrobat Reader is used for viewing, printing, signing, and commenting on Portable Document Format (PDF) files. You can use the free version, or for more complex files, install Acrobat Pro (free with Colby's campus license).
Perusall can integrate directly into our Learning Management System (Moodle) for easy assignment creation and grade reporting. Colby has a limited number of licences.
Moodle grading annotation is a built-in tool for instructors to directly mark up student assignment submissions (usually PDFs or converted files) with highlights, text boxes, shapes, stamps, and freehand drawings. This provides in-line feedback alongside standard grade entry and overall comments in a right-hand panel, streamlining the grading process in Moodle.
Use Moodle Annotation for Grading