Annotate PRO for responding to student message board posts

Annotate PRO is a tool, developed by 11trees, that helps teachers streamline response to student writing by providing a library of common comments that they can easily insert into writing projects.

The Annotate PRO site asks teachers, "Do you ever feel like you say the same thing over and over again to students?" While acknowledging that of course teaching often involves repetition, the site asks what would happen if teachers could streamline that process when responding to student writing, thus putting more energy into deeper feedback and teaching. A series of screenshots show how to use Annotate PRO:

• Once downloaded as a Chrome Extension, Annotate PRO appears as a sidebar.
• Users simply click anywhere that feedback can be provided within a browser: "Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, Gmail – just about anywhere you can type feedback into a webpage."
• From there, users add a comment.
• Groups of comments can be saved to create personal, program, or even institutional libraries.

Annotate PRO allows for "smart automation." Teachers can use it to reduce repetitive keystrokes, but they can customize it using a "Free Form Comment" function that pops up in sidebar when using the tool.

Annotate PRO has great functionality for helping teachers respond to digital papers, and, I suppose, such is still the traditional framework of teacher writing feedback: A teacher giving feedback to a student essay/report/paper. 11trees provides a video description of this core use here.

However, I want to focus on another aspect of Annotate PRO: Its use in developing a library of responses for electronic forums like discussion boards.

As I have written about numerous times, a large component of student writing, and not just in OWCs, involves short, informal writing on electronic platforms. In many courses, students compose most of their words in these environments.

Teachers want to encourage this, but how do they respond/moderate in ways that are helpful for student learning? I've come across and written about a number of strategies--a favorite source is the book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and Robert Tinker--and I think Annotate PRO is a smart tool that offers another possibility.

With Annotate PRO, after installation, I simply opened a Discussion in Blackboard Learn (my LMS) and clicked in a message. Voila! I could instantly drop in a comment that had been stored in a library.

It was impressive and powerful in its simplicity, and I saw immediately how Annotate PRO reduces the literal keystrokes and would free up time for for more substantive teaching. Library comments could help me with the frequent encouragement and questioning posts while I used "Free Form Comments" for more specific moderating and commenting posts.

A common--and, at times, legitimate--complaint from students is that they feel no presence from their teachers on discussions. Teachers are seeking strategies and pedagogies to work more fully and carefully with students in discussion environments. (The Community of Inquiry framework [1] offers a way to think about teacher presence.) Annotate PRO provides them with a technology to help them do that.

Note
1) As described by Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher educationmodel. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

OWI: Opportunities in medium, genre, volume

I have another blogging life, and this month those lives weirdly intersect, as I'm building here on my post for my blog Virtual Children (which I've been keeping on the Website When Falls the Coliseum, for several years). I posted there about another blog article written by a friend of mine on the Website 11trees; his smart post describes how much he writes in a work day, what he called just an average writing day for a "knowledge worker." In a one-day diary, he calculates he wrote about 2,500 words, saying, "We write more words every day than many college or high school students write in an entire term." 

His post is so smart for many reasons, particularly because it spurs great conversations about genre, medium, and writing volume. In his log, the writer describes all kinds of writing he did during his "writing day." At 5 am he's emailing; he works on PowerPoints and text messages; he drafts notes and other materials in/through word processing programs and different collaboration software. He's composing collaboratively with people around the world, planning, drafting, and putting on finishing touches.

If you teach writing, you have probably thought a lot about how and how much people write. I think the generation we’re educating now interacts with each other through writing more than any generation ever

But our teaching to prepare students for their writing lives often doesn’t account for the rhetorical complexity, the varied genres, and the sheer volume of the writing they will do. In fact, in many cases, writing instruction looks pretty similar to the way it looked many decades ago.

I remember in my earliest moments of interest in OWI that I felt that digital instructional settings opened new avenues for teaching and learning writing. In OWCs, students compose in multi-audience environments that are close to writing they will do in their professional lives -- and these environments are simply inherent parts of the course. Also, it was evident that electronic writing spaces allow teachers to assign lots of informal and exploratory writing, providing many opportunities for students to engage in meta-reflection about their composing processes. 

To me, ed tech tools are not exclusive to online instruction -- I mean, you can use digital tools with any type of course -- but the digital environment of OWI does seem to lead teachers to explore tech tools, so they will find new ways to interact with and even assess student writing that make the whole process more productive. For instance, 11trees is a great example of a tool that makes it easier for teachers to respond to student writing.

As I’ve described before, a brief analysis of my own 10-week, quarter-system classes showed  students were writing some 15,000 words through message boards and electronic journals. I was proud when I found that out and still am; I feel they had a challenging writing experience. But if you think about that number in comparison with the 2,500 daily words of a "knowledge worker,” you realize I might need to significantly up the workload yet if I'm going to responsibly teach writing that prepares students for what they’ll face at the next stage.

By the way, I'm not advocating a kind of mindless kowtowing to the “real world.” I don't want us to dispense of genres/modes like the exploratory essay or writing to learn. But the limitations of "school writing" get exposed in productive ways in online writing courses. The only game in town need not be "papers" that don't resemble the short, high-stakes writing that they do. We can put them in posting and sharing situations that allow us to better teach them what they will do -- and are doing -- in other parts of their lives.

This is a major component of the promise I see of OWI. Perhaps we need to do more in our research to understand not just the kinds but the amount of writing that take place in various professions.