Instead of giving students a reading assignment and having them answer specific questions about it in a paper they turn in to be graded,  I’m going to have students read and annotate a book on Perusall. Perusall is a social annotation program, where students can ask questions or make comments about the book as they are reading it.  Other students can interact with those comments and questions.  What is really cool about the program is that the instructor can set the guidelines for how it would like Perusall to evaluate those comments.  You can set the minimum number of annotations that are required, a penalty if students don’t read until to the end of the assignment, require students to make annotations spread throughout the entire work, etc. You can then go in to the Perusall gradebook, look at all the annotations/comments that students made, see how long they spent on the reading, see how much of the reading they finished, see what grade Perusall assigned them and then adjust the grade either up or down depending on your own evaluation of how the student performed.

I’ve created a H5P activity to teach students about the different types of annotations they can make in Persuall and what constitutes a good annotation.  I based this off of a handout created by physics professor Phoebe Jackson to teach her students about making high quality annotations.

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