A social annotation tool to prepare for active learning activities and general class preparation. The Perusall platform allows users to make comments, ask questions, and interact with peers within a text, or other piece of media and provides automatic grading. This tool is also a strong candidate for a flipped classroom and can be used in large-enrollment courses.
Idea Expansion:
- Collaborative Readings: Are students doing the reading? This is a common question among faculty that Perusall helps answer by allowing students to collaboratively annotate a reading.
Pro tip: Use data analytics to identify misconceptions. - Source Evaluations: For courses where information literacy is key, having students evaluate a shared source or two can be help students determine the legitimacy and value of a source.
Pro tip: Instructors can provide tips or guidance they want students to consider as they evaluate. - Peer Review: Because of the annotation feature, Perusall is a great tool for peer reviews as it allows for feedback to be contextualized. Students not only receive feedback from one or multiple peers but can also have a conversation with and answer questions from the original author. Perusall also allows for a separate column in the Canvas gradebook.
Pro tip: Complete a norming session to ensure students understand peer review expectations.
Additional Ideas:
Syllabus Review | Case Studies | Discussion Prep.
Key Features & Functions:
- Assignment quizzes
- Variety of grading and scoring options
- Hashtags, tagging/mentions, up-voting, polling
- Reminders to participate automatically sent
- Podcasts, images, PDFs, Word docs, and videos (YouTube, Vimeo or other publicly accessible server) can also be used
- Integrates with publishers; ability to purchase course textbook
- Works with Open Educational Resources (OERs)
- Detailed analytics including confusion reports, heat maps, and time viewing
- Bookmarking and note-taking
- Read-a-loud feature
What to Expect:
Learning curve & usability: The amount of time and effort to learn the tool. Perusall is considered easy to learn and use for reading and annotation activities by both faculty and students.
Scalability: Tasks can be scaled to larger class sizes. Perusall will automatically create small groups and auto-grades assignments in Canvas making it a great choice for both small and large-enrollment courses.
Facilitation: Facilitation considers how instructors support students through the learning experience, provide feedback, and guide students in making connections through the tool. Perusall’s features aide in the ease of facilitation by providing the ability to make contextualized comments within assignments, answer questions, give feedback, collect data, and more!
Content Management: Make updates, edits, and copy to different courses. Perusall allows for editing of existing assignments. Assignments can be copied from past courses or others’ courses with a copy code.
Visit Instructor Support to learn more and work with an Instructional Designer or Perusall Support for additional resources.