Video: ianno21 Panel: Social Annotation in K-12 Literacy Education (DocDrop)

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my name is fran i'm from hypothesis and i want to thank you for coming today to the to our panel social annotation in k-12 literacy education um we've got our

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moderator raymie clear here he's going to take over in a minute we also have with us courtney cleffman and i hope i pronounced that right and joe dillon

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who i know from liquid margins way back to a couple weeks ago and we also um should have um morgan jackson with us today she was having a bit of trouble

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with her audio so hopefully she'll come back on and we can troubleshoot that for her um and so yeah wait a few minutes and a couple people i'm trickling in so we'll wait a couple of minutes but um

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i'm gonna put it up now and turn it over to rainey so thanks to our panel for being here and thanks raimi wonderful frannie thank you so much and

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welcome everyone to i annotate this is day two uh as you know we are reading together and learning together and i just want to thank you for joining in today's session this session is

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specifically focused on the use of social annotation in k12 contexts and we're joined by an expert panel of educators whose practice whose pedagogy

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and who's really kind of practical wisdom about social annotation is really so exemplary that we wanted to make sure that you heard from all of them and so we have three educators with us today who

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we will hear from um i'm going to give brief introductions and then we'll just we'll just dive right in after i give a little bit of context we're giving just a slightly delayed start here as one of our panelists is

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having a little bit of an audio problem so let me begin as some folks trickle in by just mentioning again that my name is raymie clear over the course of the past year i've been serving as the scholar in

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residence at hypothesis researching the ways in which social annotation supports learning broadly defined and specifically aspects of literacy education my background

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is originally as a middle school and then high school teacher i began my teaching career in new york city and have since gone on to work as a teacher educator and now day to day i'm an assistant professor of learning design and

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technology at the university of colorado in denver so i'm going to introduce our panel um slowly and then i think if it's okay with courtney you will kick off with you first can i get is that okay courtney awesome

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and then hopefully as folks trickle in um we'll also have a chance to get morgan back into the mix but let me mention our three panelists today and introduce all of them now so we're going to first hear from

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courtney cleffman courtney is a high school english language arts teacher who is passionate about intentionally creating space for student voice through structured interaction

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an induction mentor she's developed professional learning opportunities and supports for new teachers she's a mentor teacher in her district she's with the san diego area writing project that's a local

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project of the broader national writing project organization and we're just really thrilled to have courtney here so courtney welcome um after courtney we're gonna hear from joe dillon joe is an english

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teacher and an instructional coach at gateway high school that's in aurora colorado he also is a member of the denver writing project

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and joe and i go back a while together organizing projects like the marginal syllabus for a few years and then we'll also be joined by morgan jackson

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and morgan we're going to mute you for just a moment but i'm so glad to have you back in here getting a little bit of uh echo there we go morgan is a high school english teacher at bishop gorman high school in las vegas nevada

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she believes in providing her students the opportunity to think and articulate their thoughts through a variety of experiences and morgan's goal is to help her students learn and grow and think critically so it's just really a pleasure

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to have courtney and morgan and joe with us today for our panel on social annotation in k12 teaching and learning so enough rambling from me um i will be doing some q a and some

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follow-up as our uh presenters um move through their their talks this morning but we'll begin with courtney and so courtney uh take it away i know we'll juggle the screen a little bit here but

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welcome hi everyone so good to be here this morning yesterday's uh keynote and the panel presentation were both so thought-provoking i was like taking notes and trying to add to my presentation and

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as things were going so um as raymie mentioned i'm a high school english teacher and um i was thinking about what i would want to share with you all today um in terms of my practice around social

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annotation and i really thought about um the ways that i engage students in both the pre and post activities surrounding the social annotation and how that establishes

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both the purpose and works to help develop depth um in what occurs during the social annotation process for my students and so i thought i would share a little bit about that with you today um i wanted to ground it in a little bit

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of my equity vision and so um really my goal in my classroom is to decenter myself and structure opportunities for my students to

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really develop their voice through interaction that has a little bit to do with my first 10 years of teaching at a school predominantly on the west side of our district that worked with english learners and you know thinking about ways that we

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could use interaction and language in order to um you know develop agency and ownership of the learning and um this quote here from morrison that i read in her source of

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self-regard this year really i think sits squarely with with that vision of equity that i have where she mentions that um listening assuming sometimes i have a history

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a language of you an idea a specificity assuming that what i know may be useful may enhance what you know may extend or complete it and this idea that memory my memory is as necessary to yours as your memory is to mine um

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just really reminds me of the importance of establishing um the idea of like a discourse community that has a culture of listening uh flexibility

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um open-mindedness are all really important kind of key characteristics of what i want to help develop in my students and so um it's really at the heart of why social annotation resonates with me

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i think um so with that in mind um through twitter actually um i i came across this concept of social annotation this year which was like how have i never thought of this before right like

00:07:27

i annotate i'm really about student interaction and developing those discourses how have i never put those two things together and so when i heard this idea and and remy kind of stepped in and pointed me towards some resources

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um i sat down and i really thought about what types of student contributions do i value in the classroom what is something that i recognize as as one of those valuable contributions and how can we offer students a variety

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of ways to enter into that conversation does it always have to be verbal does it you know because we often find that the same you know more dominant students tend to be the ones that that step in and want to say things verbally in the classroom

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so what other ways could we look at that and then lastly building on that what role might social annotation play in inviting students to share and develop their thinking within that discourse community that i'm trying to develop

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and so i know through you know vygotsky and the whole social cultural uh nature of learning and and the work that aidawaki does with west ed um that for me in my classroom it's important to engage students in quality

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interactions i want to make sure that those interactions sustain language focus by explicitly developing disciplinary language and that oftentimes um

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we learn when we're in conversation with others and so this idea of social annotation was really interesting um when i first heard about it i also read goldie mohammed's cultivating genius this year and her

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naming this idea of having a literary presence was really interesting to me like how do i help students develop that literary presence this idea of staking a claim and making oneself visible within the intellectual

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community through acts of literacy is an important consideration in the development of student voice within that learning community and so i wanted to engage students in this idea of co-constructing our purpose together so

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i mean social collaborative annotation was new to me i'm assuming it was new to them they were very well versed in annotating by themselves and you know at some point i started noticing it became kind of a performative act

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like they were kind of like oh i'm going to annotate because the teacher told me to and i thought okay how can i jar that thought you know how can i mix this up and get them to own this idea of social annotation and so i gave him a jam board

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that was blank and it just said collaborative annotation in the center and i had them work with me to construct what might that look like and what might we gain from it because if they can

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name those things maybe they will be more invested in making it part of their actual literary life not just in my classroom right and so these are the things they came up

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with um i i was quiet i muted myself and i let them just post they posted ideas and there was no color to begin with um they changed the colors as they know they're they're they're familiar with infinity mapping

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in my classroom and so this idea that we start by posting some ideas and then we begin to group them if we notice that one person said something that was similar to what i said we start to group them together and they came upon this idea starting to

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change the colors of the sticky notes in order to kind of you know group those ideas and so they touched on things that i expected right like uh there are different perspectives that might be offered if we if we um annotate collaboratively i might see

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something from a different world view than i'm familiar with um they they touched on this idea of deepening or expanding ideas that you know maybe i post an idea and someone builds on it um making meaning of course and then i

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was actually kind of surprised that and this i was hoping because we've been working on this this year but this idea of like metacognitive reflection right i might see something else and then i might realize that my learning is changing or my understanding

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is changing is really interesting to me um and then this other idea of like feedback i might gain feedback by seeing what other people have to say in real time um and so we work together to kind of construct what social annotation might

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look like in our classroom and based on that um i kind of took them into their first experience with social annotation i wanted to keep it kind of open i didn't want to

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i don't know i guess i wanted to create kind of a low-stakes um non-evaluative situation where they could enter into this conversation in ways that were authentic to their own meaning making process

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so while one student might step in and highlight some things and comment on that another might i don't know have more analytical understanding of the author's structure you know and i didn't want to um control too much of that

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and so the initial annotations that they did were very self-centered right they were very like here's what i notice here's my connection and here's what i wonder and the first time around that we did it they really stuck with those sentence like starters

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you know they kind of just said i noticed i wonder and they were very kind of like um repetitive about that um and so here are a couple of examples um and this is our

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i would say like our third or fourth kind of attempt at what this could look like um across different platforms we played around a little bit on jamboard with some social orientation and then this is an example from google docs as well

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um but students were in small groups of four um i try not to go bigger than that because it gets a bit cluttered um and i wanted to make sure that students felt heard within their groups and so this is an

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example of um two students and i don't know if one influenced the other or not but they both interestingly enough commented on structural choices the author was making so um even though i had barely

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introduced this idea of charting or descriptive outlining they were using rhetorically active verbs to describe what the author was doing here's a different group they did something very different so um one student chose to enter into

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conversation with the author right this idea of asking a question based on what the author had to say um and then the two girls down below it was really interesting kind of interacted with each other's ideas right off the bat without even

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without even direction from me to respond to one another and so they they moved into kind of questions of author credibility and kind of rhetorical analysis which was very different than what the first group did

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so as i noticed these things happening and as at the same time i was kind of leading some professional development with the writing project at the time um i spoke with one of our co-directors christine connie and she kind of said well wouldn't it be

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cool if we put them in conversation with each other right like one group very did one very distinctive thing this other group did something else they should see what you know what the other people are doing and so we kind of together came up with this

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idea of inviting groups to listen to one another and so um you know some groups really focused on content and paraphrasing while others dove into rhetorical analysis or structural analysis and

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even others still had personal reactions um that were equally valid um because they were all topics that i was going to have them kind of make arguments about later and so i wanted them to see each other's ideas and so i invited them

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to visit other groups annotations and then return to their own in order to add follow-up comments or maybe more developed ideas if they wanted to post their own and so this was kind of something that i

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was trying out this year for the first time it was really interesting process and then as a result of that um we as a class developed kind of a i would say less of a it's not a rubric i would say it's more of a resource that

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we can then go to later on and hyperlink examples of what these things could look like and so we thought about the different things that we called out on that initial jamboard the affinity map and jamboard

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and we work together to think about different reasons why you might annotate together or how what you might gain from that and then we hyperlinked examples of student um

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you know of student annotations uh and what those would look like um so that they could see maybe what a quality um example of students discussing word choice would look like um in interaction with each other and so

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i don't know what happens can you remy can you see this when i click on something different okay i wasn't sure if it would only stick with that one tab that i was in you've got something loading now

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coordinating yeah and then take a moment yeah so i think what was really interesting and this is just the teacher review this is not directly on the text this is the notification i get from google docs on my end via email but what was kind of cool is i noticed

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like a student would make an initial comment about you know this reference to a hawk in the text and then the second student added on kind of a more in-depth analysis of what that hawk could

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represent um talking about what hawks are and how you know how that might be viewed um you know interpreted in the text and then the third student while they all agree with each other you notice that their languages like i also or i agree with

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um they add more complexity and depth to the initial comment um and they walk away from um grade level this would be um english 10 english 10 would be this

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example and so it was really interesting and they knew i think in this particular situation that they were headed toward a literary analysis type of thing so i think that that's what was um you know the the lens that they were looking at this

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through um but i thought it was really interesting that they built together kind of a deeper analysis than what the original poster kind of had um so we work together in order to

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um develop this kind of set of expectations of what what social annotation could look like or moves they might make during that process and then as a result of all that and remy you can kind of let me know about timing

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i know i kind of lost track of where i am um in terms of my 10 minutes but this is great just keep rolling cool um so as a result of all that i i they're in they're familiar with the

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practice of metacognitive reflection i i often like build in some kind of google form as a result of what they their interactions that they do um because i don't grade the interactions i want them to find value in those interactions i want them to understand

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that they've gained something through it and then it leads to something else right and so um here's one of the questions that i post to them post social annotation is um you know consider the interactions you had during

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the activity which of these are true for you um you know and so the top two were the first two actually um that i learned new ideas or ways of interpreting the text as a result of this interaction

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or that i saw different perspectives other than my own which is you know again one of like kind of the key things that i'm trying to develop in my classroom um anyway which is wonderful and then off you know

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they selected some other options as well about developing language extending their ideas things like that um and so getting them to think about how the interaction

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helped their own thinking um was important to me and then i also followed it up with like a likert scale type of question where i ask them to what extent do you think this interrupt this social annotation interaction

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um helped you know improve your understanding of the text and they kind of you know rate themselves on a scale and then i followed up with an open-ended question about how how that you know interaction helped them improve their thinking and so

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some of their comments were i like seeing others process and highlighting and what they found important so it was interesting seeing it happen real time you notice like highlighting is happening comments are popping up it's all you know it's a lot

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i found that the teachers i engaged this in were a little bit overwhelmed by that but students are not phased like that this is part of their everyday like natural interaction kind of process and so for them they liked seeing what others found

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important as they were highlighting and doing things it helped give them different perspectives but then also created space for their own voice which was really important um another student said that writing things out before i say them helps me develop my

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thinking which then gives me kind of a thought process of okay how could social annotation work in connection with speaking right could a a class discussion occur after the social annotation occurs or

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you know what order might that happen um he says it helps him expand his thinking makes him more aware of details he didn't notice this was happening in a completely online setting um i i asked him at the end of the year

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would you want to take do this like next year like we're all going back fully in person next year according to our district and so is this something you'd want to continue doing and a lot of them said yes it doesn't replace classroom discussion

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however they felt they found value in the process um another student said that it's much more engaging because you see other people's thoughts develop in real time where you can trace it back to the text which was another major takeaway is that

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oftentimes in english classrooms we as teachers pull out quotes and we have them do something on a chart or somewhere else this in context annotation activity was so much more valuable it helped

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develop depth and nuance that didn't happen when i had them do something on a chart somewhere else away from the text and so i this idea of gaining feedback in real time was really interesting to me

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and then the last student said the collaborative annotation forced me to read the text through different lenses and communicate my ideas with people who didn't always think similarly so this idea of like that whole rhetorical situation of

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speaker audience purpose it's all live and happening as you're engaging in this kind of activity in real time um so i thought that that was another kind of interesting takeaway and then kind of just to kind of sum it

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up i found i really valued social annotation because it democratized the student talk time um it wasn't just me calling on a student asking them to speak

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or someone voluntarily raising their hand and speaking everyone was interacting speaking and listening speaking you know through writing and listening to each other inner you know um together

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and it was all happening live and i could see who was doing what um and it could happen asynchronously as well um it did give students the space to um revisit um the annotations and so i

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thought that that was kind of a great takeaway as well it made student thinking visible not only to their fellow students but also to me um so you know while they're not all in muting or turning on their cameras that's okay

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because i can see your thinking here um they really love that it created a living record of the thinking and interaction that occurred which often gets lost in a classroom discussion unless you're taking copious notes right like that moment where someone said something

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really interesting sometimes just is gone once you step out of the classroom and so i often found that students were their little icons were hovering you know in the corner if i opened up a doc they were still there they were there two weeks from now or

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you know they would revisit the text and continue building on ideas long after the class was over um students increasingly saw value so i noticed that while they initially posted their required number of posts

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um in that last example they really owned it and they they responded as many times as they wanted so that'd be interesting to chart over the course of a year is the ownership of it and then um it seemed like like i said

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before they made deeper and more nuanced interpretations because it was in context the text was right there and they could see it all and make connections so i found that that was really great as well so i think i don't know again timing

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sorry about that you know this is fantastic i really appreciate the deep dive into your classroom and i've been taking notes and sharing some things on twitter but yes indeed much much much appreciation

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we will circle back courtney to you as we move through our presentations but let's see morgan if we can bring you into the conversation now awesome all right we're going to try and share um it's going to be interesting because i have to admit that we have a very

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similar philosophy and a very similar usage let's go to the very beginning so i am morgan jackson i use she her pronouns i'm an english teacher at bishop gorman high school in las vegas nevada

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and very similarly to how it was discussed previously the biggest part for me using social annotations is the egalitarian aspect that it provides to my classroom i'm a high school english teacher um i

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primarily teach juniors and seniors and so when i talk about egalitarianism it's an ability level i have students who aren't comfortable speaking or they don't think that you know someone else said it better than them so

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you'll get the kids always say the same thing well when you're writing simultaneously there is no i was going to say the same thing or they took my idea because you're not sharing them you know out loud you're all right at the same time and if you're working on yours you

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don't really know if someone's highlighted the same concept or talked about the same thing as you're going through um learning style i have some students who just are not a fan of um sharing out loud or they

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consider themselves a slower reader and or a slower thinker and so they're like i don't know what to say or how to say it i find that gender and race also play a part

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can you guys hear me all right i'm getting dinging on my side okay i find that gender and race sometimes play a role depending on what we're talking about um from a gender perspective i think one of the biggest things that shows

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up is when um i'm gonna go ahead and present that maybe it'll make it a little bit better um is when i'm having class discussions i find that in my classes they're very heavily boy um but a lot of times my female students

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will take over conversations um or my my boy students don't have a response right away they need a moment to kind of think through their thoughts and so this allows for a an egalitarian approach to that i don't get kind of

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that um the person who dominates the conversation in my school we are fairly racially diverse and i find that some students who have discomfort discussing racial implications or things that are a

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little bit more uncomfortable in class are far more comfortable putting it in writing because they can stop and think about it for a moment and really come up with what they're going to say from a perspective of exposure there is

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an exposure to a couple of things one is each other's thoughts i find that when we're sharing our thoughts verbally the student whose hand is raised isn't listening to the student who's speaking in part

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because they're formulating their opinion and they're trying not to forget what they want to say so there's that like i know what i want to say i know what i want to say and then they either wind up repeating something or it changes the topic entirely

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because they weren't really listening to what someone was saying whereas when you're writing it you're writing your thoughts but you're able to go back and read what other people wrote without the need to kind of hold on

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to how you want to participate or what you want to say next um there's also no need to wait so if you're reading someone's comments um whether we can we use hypothesis to annotate we also use um google docs and our say the google suite

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of things so whether it's excel or docs or jamboard the idea that you can comment immediately upon reading someone's um comment as opposed to having to wait to get back around to you i also have

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where students will forget what they want to say or it goes back to a previously talked about topic and they don't want to revert the conversation so they'll say never mind so this allows them to focus on their thoughts when they're writing but also really take the

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time to understand and listen to what other students are saying it also brings in topics outside of the curriculum to an extent if i'm using something like hypothesis i can bring in a topic or an article

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that is tangentially related to what we're doing or not related at all just for them to focus on the concept of speaking and listening going through deciding what they want to say coming up with an idea and writing

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it down which is often a skill my students have but they don't necessarily transfer it directly into the classroom so this is a way to kind of demonstrate that you have the ability to think critically about something

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write an idea about it and then discuss it academically so i think that's also a very important aspect of being able to expose them to those things additionally and when you talk about reader response

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theory something like social annotations helps to anchor the reader response theory in the text as opposed to directly into their lives a lot of times my students will get off track if we're just having a conversation or a discussion

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and they want to have a conversation about how it relates to them or this reminds me of this one thing they did this summer and the conversation is kind of derailed by these side stories whereas social annotations requires that

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they're rooting their conversation and their comment in the text itself and that really helps to focus their reader response back to the actual text and what the author was saying

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um these are examples that i pulled from my students just from hypothesis articles that we've used i will say one of the things because it's open and much like courtney said students can go back to it i find that my students actually go a

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lot deeper in their social annotations then they do in class discussions because they don't have the time to necessarily pull things together or they're going really quickly to kind of get done with it but this allows them

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to read what other people have written and to think about it and kind of go back and have this back and forth that doesn't really exist or isn't really allotted for in a classroom discussion where you only have

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a set amount of time and a lot of that time is used trying to kind of put it together i have students have filler words they know what they want to say they aren't sure how to say it this eliminates all of that and so for me i find that this is a

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great lead-in honestly when we're talking social and i'm going to go and stop ceremony now but it's a great lead-in when we're talking about class discussions when they can socially

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annotate and get all their ideas out and they know what they want to say and then we come back together and we have a discussion i find that those students who maybe wouldn't have shared normally are okay sharing now because they've had a chance to think through their ideas

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they've had a chance to realize they're not the only person who thinks that and so they're more confident in raising their hand after a social annotation to be like actually oh and i just realized that because now they've got it out it's open they don't have to be the

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first person to speak everyone has ideas and either the stigma of being different um is no longer there or it's the idea that they um they're just

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comfortable not being that first one to share so for me i find that social annotations much like courtney said actually really helps to kind of start that conversation or that discussion piece in a classroom because we've kind of already pushed it

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in a very comfortable boundary um it also builds a really great community in my classroom so i think that's that's a really interesting piece for me is just the way it allows my students to kind of

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open up and come together they do also i think unless the courtney we have a very similar philosophy and how we're running social annotations in our classrooms um but i think it's good even for this it's good to see that

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it's working for other people and kind of how other people are doing it remy i see your finger i've got too much going on morgan we lost your slides at one point first of all morgan thank you so much i and so as you

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continue let's make sure that we curate everyone's slides after the session but morgan you were saying something about community right now and i wanted knowing that we've spoken about this relationship before

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maybe can you just say a little bit more if you don't mind about how you see social annotation really deepening your students um there's two parts there one social

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annotation takes the focus off of me as the teacher when they're socially annotating i'm not a part of that here's the text annotate what are your thoughts what are you thinking reply to each other

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i'm i'm a bystander i'm watching i'm listening i'm going ooh that sounds really interesting but i'm not like hey miss jackson what do you think of this is this supposed to mean this it's really them coming together and

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finding that they can be their own experts and so someone has a question someone else gets to come and go hey i think it means and and they get to kind of build that amongst themselves but also it's similar to um they're

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learning how to interact with each other they're learning how to balance i hear your opinion i see your opinion what do i agree with this what do i disagree with this and it's done and because it's written

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there is no heat of the moment so to speak and so they really learn to respectfully respond to each other and you get a very civil dialogue of well i see that but i still think that and that's something that

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they really don't they don't get in a lot of times in a discussion you get a couple people going back and forth but if you were in the bathroom you missed it or you weren't paying attention because you were thinking about what you wanted to say this is a

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way where it's there for everyone to see and you go back to it and someone mentioned earlier hybrid or online i did hybrid this year and it's amazing because it doesn't matter where you are i will admit social annotation was a godsend for me

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when we went um online in march because i didn't have to stop the collaboration we didn't have to stop the discussion it was something we knew how to do and it was a tool we were already using and it works just as well

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physically in class as it does at home it works well if you're present as a teacher it works well if there's a sub it's something that really they take ownership of it it's all them and there's no wrong way to do it

00:33:29

really so long as you're anchoring it back to the text it really helps them understand that idea of there's not a wrong way to read this so long as it's anchored to the text so the can i say this i don't know can

00:33:42

you say that highlight it and tell me why you think that and it really does deepen us as a classroom to kind of come together and this is theirs this is what they created at the end of it it's not

00:33:53

my teacher said this is what it means it's we wrote down our ideas and after coming together this is what we collectively came up with and it really doesn't have anything to do with me other than i set up the groups or i gave them the

00:34:06

document you're muted no thanks sorry i was going to try to jump back and forth yeah i think i got a question from bodong and it's so lovely to have you here thanks so much for hanging out with us today bodang chen an associate professor at

00:34:21

the university of minnesota has researched social annotation pretty extensively i think that his question is for you morgan he asks can you share more about the sentence starters that you used to scaffold

00:34:34

student annotation i think that was actually for courtney when she was talking about her notice wonder connect okay because i don't actually because my students are juniors and seniors and i was able to loop with quite a few of

00:34:48

them um i really don't give them uh starters just because of their 11th and 12th graders for the most part we're at that like generate with where you are um so i think that was for courtney

00:35:00

carter can we bring you back in then i'm sorry that i'm juggling a few different pieces here and then we'll continue on thanks courtney yeah that's okay um so the initial sentence starter so with my 10th graders

00:35:13

i don't do as much scaffolding as i do with my nine co-teach class um so i would say that the sentence starters are pretty simple for the initial posts right um a lot of them stuck with like the i notice

00:35:26

kind of um i wonder and then posing questions i did give them and i can uh i'm looking for the resource that i have as well but i definitely did give them frames for responding to one another um

00:35:39

like morgan was saying knowing how to not just say good idea or i disagree or you know like how to kind of weigh in um

00:35:50

academically or politely is something that the ninth graders needed a lot of work on and so i'll post that in the chat i have like a resource that i use um that came from an initial i remember i mean i can't remember the exact person that you

00:36:04

pointed me toward but there was a um really great resource that you shared with me on twitter and i took that and i kind of modified it for like a high school audience and i added sentence frames that weren't there before um

00:36:16

that i can share on in the chat in just a moment when i find it um and so the initial starters were fairly simple like i said they were kind of like i noticed i wonder types of things and then the follow-up ones were

00:36:29

kind of derived from what i had seen previously from classroom discussions where often times even in like socratic seminar you especially the first time you do it a student will say something and then lots of students will do that i agree i

00:36:42

agree i agree and there's just a lot of head nodding that occurs without any novel things added or slight nuances to differentiate one's perspective from another and so

00:36:55

um i anticipated that happening and um created a resource that i'll share with you all in the chat um i love project zeros making thinking visible stuff it's awesome um so i'll have to check

00:37:08

that out thank you becky hopefully that answers your question and thanks folks who are hanging in there as we juggle the tech here and work with some new some new platforms i appreciate that um and that that's that's for me too

00:37:21

morgan thank you so much courtney thank you so much let's bring joan to the conversation uh hear from him and then we'll continue to open this up for people's responses and just continued q a joe welcome thanks raymie and it was

00:37:35

great to hear both courtney and morgan's perspective on social annotation and how it works in both your classrooms and i think this probably will add a little will be a little bit complimentary um let me share my screen and make sure i've got that

00:37:48

cooking before i get too far into this so i'm gonna share notes with you on uh annotation and praxis i'm joe dillon um i'm an english teacher at gateway high school in aurora colorado

00:38:01

and this last year was my 16th year as a literacy teacher so my background for many years was in middle school classrooms and uh and for about 13 years i've been a literacy coach as well as a teacher so

00:38:15

that's afforded me the privilege of going into other teachers classrooms even as young as teaching students as young as kindergarten and so i've had a an opportunity to look at literacy instruction from you know across

00:38:29

lots of different grades and and i do think about myself as a you know as a somebody who's trying to support literacy skill and development and also naming and noticing the literacies our students have and there's a little bit of tension for me

00:38:43

in terms of like how english is traditionally taught in high school so i like to kind of push back on the notion of what we expect an english class to do and i think social annotation probably helps with that so

00:38:55

the last thing here on this in initial slide is i think that the concept of praxis is really important for me and so the idea that most people's teaching reflective practitioners their practice

00:39:08

isn't a static thing it's not the kind of thing you do the same same every year after year probably heard you know morgan and courtney share epiphanies from trying new things and i think

00:39:20

that's really sort of the lifeblood of of good teaching and learning and good sort of literacy literacy development so um so just as i get started here i want to

00:39:34

think about a quote that was what came from christopher m dean in an article that he wrote for the atlantic magazine says teaching isn't about managing behavior it's about reaching students where they really are that's the

00:39:46

sub headline and the quote is the best teachers don't just keep teaching instead they use their pedagogy as protest they disrupt teaching norms that harm vulnerable students

00:39:58

so i share this quote not because you know i think my teaching really well um exemplifies this but it's something that pushes um on my practice and moves me into a

00:40:11

space of praxis when i think about what's happening in the world and what's happening in terms of where my students really are and how we might you know sort of learn as much as we can in community

00:40:24

at the same time i like to try to think about ways to disrupt teaching norms that can harm vulnerable students so hopefully that some of this comes out in what i share but that is something that

00:40:35

sort of drives my thinking um i think annotation has lots of promise of course as a tool for literacy instruction i think morgan and courtney have shared quite a bit about that this is a a

00:40:48

photograph obviously of some social annotation that actually happened in a professional learning um with teachers um years ago but a lot of the social annotation happens in my classroom looks like this

00:41:01

right they're sort of like you know a central text on a piece of chart paper there's young people milling around the room walking around writing on writing on the chart

00:41:14

and what happens is the an invisible process what can be an invisible process becomes visible right if you're curious about what was striking you know the other readers in the classroom now you have arrows that show

00:41:29

you what was standing out to them or underlines that indicate that for them and so to me this is this is a a lot of the social annotation that happens in my classroom is kind of

00:41:41

constructed with charts and markers and pieces of paper to also you know beyond making something that's invisible really visible we can make something that can feel like an independent activity

00:41:54

that you want to do right something social that there's really no way to do wrong um this is a book that has sort of informed my teaching for years the literature workshop by

00:42:08

sheridan blau he's at columbia university he's a professor of practice and he's really influential in the national writing project but some of the key ideas that you know again shape my

00:42:20

practice and practice are ideas that i think you've heard morgan and courtney share which meaning is socially constructed it's really important to me to ask students to to write about lines so writing happens

00:42:34

while students are reading and then readings like writings develop in drafts and so social annotation can make visible the way a really like

00:42:47

developed reading of a text maybe started with a lot of question marks and then this important question at the bottom of this slide is you know as opposed to a teacher sort of

00:42:59

reading a student's notes or reading what they've they've written about a text and you know assigning value to the reading students have done they can ask the question as

00:43:11

a member of a community of readers why am i reading this differently than the way you're reading it and invite students to ask that same question right like why is my reading not the same as everyone else's

00:43:24

the idea that the answers you know aren't necessarily where the teacher's teacher always has the best reading but instead readings might be informed by different identities or different perspectives

00:43:36

particularly where students might be representing sort of a marginal perspective or an often unconsiderate perspective and then really important probably what i'll be talking about here

00:43:48

is we can collaboratively construct critical lenses using social annotation and i think that's really important because a lot of times in the teaching of traditional english

00:44:00

we think about like asking students to you know attempt literary criticism from a traditional framework like marxism or feminism etc so how might collaboratively

00:44:13

constructing those um be a way to uh to invite more perspectives perspectives into critical thinking about the text we encounter so here's a text

00:44:29

that i read most i ask my students to read most every year it's a short fiction story called cell one by chimamanda ngozi adichie and it was published in the new yorker

00:44:40

it was also published as as part of a collection of short stories that she wrote in a collection called the thing around your neck and i use hypothesis i use it periodically in my class to

00:44:53

to model my own note-taking process and like i might talk to them about why do i use a tool like this why do i sometimes make my annotations public but this one probably exemplifies like how i ask them to think about

00:45:07

um reading reading sort of in drafts right the first time through they might read a sh a section of this text and they might just put question marks exclamation part exclamation marks and ellipses in the

00:45:21

margins and then as a follow-up they might be thinking through a framework we use in my class called says means matters um and so the idea that you know giving them a support

00:45:32

for social annotation can uh lead to developed you know collaborative readings of texts and so there's lots of these types of note takers

00:45:44

in my class and this one you can see it it's in a google docs format and so students are asked to find a line right and then they can write what what that line means to them or what they think it

00:45:57

means and then why it matters maybe why it matters in the text maybe why it matters to them maybe why it matters in the world it can be as open-ended as we like but the idea that if they're unsure about

00:46:09

what to write they're asked to vote they're asked to identify the parts of text that they think have value or importance or maybe are puzzling and they think about what does this mean and why is this matter

00:46:21

this i originally borrowed this from ellen levy who does a lot of work with curriculum for english language learners and i i would say that it's fascinating to me how students approach it

00:46:33

approach annotation when they're you know learning the english language and they're struggling with what something means in a text or you know the actual meaning in english and similarly when students are sort of

00:46:46

like traditionally high performing in schools i find this structure worked pretty well as a scaffold and yeah so the class at some point becomes sort of filled with

00:46:58

these charts written on paper and students can sometimes have them um they're writing them together in groups and in google docs and then we can put them in those chart

00:47:11

papers on the walls and again we're highlighting different parts of the text and again this this also affords you know if you're not sure what to write in the margins

00:47:24

you can return to the says means matter structure so we get a lot of mileage out of that it's a flexible tool and then the thing i think that is important for me is how essential

00:47:36

questions can frame what we make note of in a text so the idea that we start really in open-ended ways and students are finding what they they uh say is important in a text or what they say is puzzling in a text

00:47:50

but i might ask a question like uh you know what is feminism in 2021 after reading informational texts about feminism and women's roles in society you can write an essay or create a

00:48:03

podcast in which you define contemporary feminism and explain how your definition updates or corrects historical connotations of the word so support your discussion with evidence from the text you've read

00:48:16

so this kind of assignment you know it starts with that big question what is feminism in 2021 it also sort of sets everybody on a trajectory where they're gonna have to make something or write something and uh

00:48:30

and then it starts to frame how we read things socially together and so as we re-encounter tim amanda ngozi adichie we might watch her ted talk and and

00:48:41

annotate that transcript um we might read in glamour magazine what president barack obama says feminism looks like we might read

00:48:53

dikes to watch out for by allison bechtel read about the bechtel test there or we might read an essay penned by pop star ariana grande where

00:49:06

she uh reflects on the you know the way women are treated in her work and then moving forward once we've

00:49:17

constructed that critical lens together as as opposed to feminism being something the teacher understands and it's something we we've come to understand together and we have new definitions for it

00:49:28

and so i think social annotation has has you know then there are new avenues we can go towards when we've constructed something like that we can say oh now what do we think a feminist would say and we can

00:49:41

socially annotate in kind of that literary criticism tradition with new definitions and new perspectives considered and then as we think about you know more justice oriented teaching we can develop other

00:49:53

critical lens in similar ways in social ways that encounter all that encompass um and use all kinds of multimedia attacks joe thank you there's a immediate

00:50:06

question here there's a lot to begin to synthesize so first of all thank you but there's an immediate question here i think from karen about how you're annotating video and i'm wondering if you might speak to that kind of brief more technical question

00:50:19

and then we'll start to synthesize across all three yeah i think uh well let's see in the past i have used a tool called vialogs so i think that's a that's a real thing

00:50:35

that you can try with students um the way we annotate ted talks is by looking at the transcripts so we watch those and and we annotate the transcripts and sometimes we make

00:50:47

copies of the transcripts in google docs and other times you know students are have the option to use hypothesis as well joe thank you for that so i'd like to bring all three of our

00:51:00

our expert panelists together because i'm so impressed by the detail that you've all shared concerning your attention to instructional planning

00:51:12

your ability to really understand these rich disciplinary practices of meaning making of textual analysis of close reading a text something that stands out to me though across all three of your presentations

00:51:25

is how social annotation it seems for all of you is a way of providing students with a really strong sense of agency that they have some of you mentioned the ideas of ownership

00:51:39

morgan began right off the bat with his idea of egalitarianism there's been a kind of strong emphasis perhaps on the teacher not having the singular

00:51:50

right reading of a text and i think for some of us as educators whether or not we've just begun our careers or we've perhaps been teaching long enough to get stuck in certain ruts

00:52:03

it's always a good reminder that students can be kind of owners of their learning trajectories and it seems as though you've all found social annotation

00:52:15

to be a particularly useful way of having students really chart their own direction as learners i'm wondering if you might all perhaps speak to this idea of

00:52:29

student agency of students as experts and how social annotation in your classrooms allows students to really own their learning morgan you want to you want to start us

00:52:41

off i will i will say something like google docs and i use hypothesis regularly as well um for me i find that my students are far more familiar with and it's far more comfortable to them because it relates

00:52:54

back to their use of social media they're very familiar with the idea of taking a piece of text which is what we would call a post or a link of some sort and commented on that and then engaging in a dialogue

00:53:07

of a reply back and forth um that's very natural to them they're native to that so when you take that and you apply it to an academic setting it's tapping into a skill that they don't normally bring into the classroom

00:53:21

but teaching high schoolers i would tell them all the time you you analyze all the time you'll spend five minutes trying to decide which emoji to send like you are very well versed in the idea of nuances

00:53:32

and analysis but they don't necessarily bring it into the classroom with them so i find that doing something like a google response or google doc where they're able to comment and reply mirror something they're already very familiar with

00:53:46

so now they're just having to tap into the academic side of it not necessarily the formatting and the they already know that part it's just bring it to the academic side so that helps with that piece for mike's

00:53:58

yeah i think it's i think back to your book grammy when i was you know digging into annotating a social annotation and thinking about what it could look like um i think there was a part where it talked about

00:54:10

like oftentimes we look at these the author as the the the knower or the expert and they kind of because they're in print you know like they live as this like on this pedestal right and the teacher often kind of gets

00:54:24

placed in in a similar proximity um and so i think as opposed to classroom discussion where again oftentimes the teachers in the front or you know

00:54:34

in this like setup that communicates something about who is a value and whose voice matters um social annotation disrupts that it um it gives them a space where they can

00:54:48

interact with the texts and the ideas where they can respond back to not just the author but each other um it was really interesting because i tried it out on on jamboard as well as google docs and while i

00:55:01

as the teacher liked the formatting of google docs and i like the it just seems a little bit more professional for some reason or academic they really they preferred jamboard which i you know i attended the um keynote

00:55:13

yesterday um with the library of congress and that new tool that they have and it really it's very similar like this idea that you can play with different shapes and move things around and

00:55:25

um it really resonated with students so anytime that i asked them like how would you like to continue doing this their answer was always jamboard like they always preferred the ability to the manipulative flexible ability of jamboard as opposed to google

00:55:39

docs which is a little bit more structured and um stagnant it's the right word in the way that they could interact um and so i thought it was really interesting especially as like it like i said

00:55:51

yesterday's keynote that and morgan's comment about emojis um different ways that it can allow students to um express their thinking and

00:56:02

respond um that is not the five paragraph essay you know that is something you know some other way of doing that and i think social annotation allows for that

00:56:14

the other thing i think it that i personally want to help demystify for students is just like um a knowledge of the reading process right so to to take for example that uh the

00:56:27

short story that i use quite a bit because i just love that short story sell one by adichie right now when i read it though what i have to be honest with with my students about is i've read it about 25

00:56:40

times right and so and what i want them to be aware of that i you know i'm sure my you know my fellow panelists understand but what i want to be clear about is like when that short story is published

00:56:52

there's no uh there's no answer key that comes with that right it's really about you know the inferences we make about where why the author wrote it the way she did and

00:57:05

what and then what impact it has on us and the idea that we can you know so i have some quote-unquote expertise that i've gained with that short story because i've just read it so many

00:57:17

a ridiculous number of times but you know the story will have importance for for young people when they can think about like what it means to them what it means to the other people in the room that

00:57:28

they're interested in and maybe what it means you know in the world it has it has resonance and we can sort of get lost we can get mistakenly lost in sort of my 20th reading being the one

00:57:41

that everybody's trying to approximate and i think that you know making the process visible so it's more it's more important that i be sort of like really really converse it

00:57:54

about my process i'm really curious about students processes and they're experts in their own processes and the idea that they've read certain things you know they have literacies that they've

00:58:06

developed by being immersed in different areas than than i am and so the idea that that reading community is really you know it's bolstered when we're talking about process as opposed to trying to approximate

00:58:20

maybe the guy at the front of the room who has the benefit of having read yeah can i can i add really quickly onto that um and it i thought about it i find that

00:58:31

my students when we don't socially anal social annotate things they wait till the end and they come up with this idea at the end whereas when you're doing a social annotation you're working throughout and so you catch these snags of

00:58:44

you know that's that no no no i think you're we're missing something somewhere as opposed to getting to the end of a short story or the end of a chapter or the end of a novel and realizing we've missed things or it's like well what does this mean

00:58:56

and they they didn't pay attention to the hawks so they don't know the birds symbolism in jane eyre because they didn't pay attention to any of the birds in jane eyre as opposed to when you're doing it throughout you do have to stop and kind of pay attention

00:59:08

as you're going and that forces them to kind of create some thoughts as we're reading as opposed to getting to the end and thinking of the text as one giant piece

00:59:21

so it's more it's more there's a more proximal nuanced reading in that sense morgan and it's perceptual in that respect as opposed to only summative i really appreciate that you know i have

00:59:33

a whole list of questions that i'm really eager to ask all of you and i'm going to just save one because i noticed that we've got a pretty lively chat we also had a few questions that are appearing there's a q a

00:59:45

section of this session that we're all in together if folks want to use that but i do want to make sure that we hear from folks who've joined us today and again thank you to everybody who's here live so we got a question again from

00:59:58

karen this is a little bit broader in terms of how we understand the idea of social annotation in relationship to the standards quote unquote teaching the standards and i know having learned so much from

01:00:11

the three of you in a variety of capacities in some cases over years or at least many months that you all have again deep expertise to kind of perhaps creatively subvert while simultaneously

01:00:24

attending to the formal requirements of being literacy educators and i'm wondering how particularly for literacy educators who may be hearing about social annotation for the

01:00:37

first time or who are curious about how this approach to reading together and to writing together in this kind of rough draft way

01:00:48

how does this allow you to say yes i am teaching to the standards and my students and their learning is aligned with the kind of formal curriculum that may

01:01:00

come from again you know other administrative you know needs of formal schooling does that does that question resonate and how do you all navigate that i think um social notation can most

01:01:17

definitely hit i mean i'm thinking specifically ela because that's you know the world that i'm in um but you know they're they're reading writing listening and speaking and you know a variety of different types of standards

01:01:29

um that i considered as i was kind of putting this in front of students um i ultimately made the decision that social annotation was not something i was grading it was something that i wanted students to value for the process

01:01:42

and what they got out of it um however then you make you know you think about um you know holding students accountable for engaging in it right and i think i saw some somebody asked a question in the chat about you know

01:01:55

what affordances would have to be made for middle schoolers you know as you go down and you know different grade levels um i think about um what comes like i said before and after

01:02:07

the interaction and oftentimes the interaction that occurs in my classroom whether it be social annotation or something else isn't the thing i grade but students come out of it and individually produce something whether it be writing or something else

01:02:20

as a result of it and those that engaged in the interaction find value in that in as they walk away right and have to you know do something else um i've definitely made connections between there's some reading and writings

01:02:32

um i'm sorry listening and speaking standards that definitely get hit with social innovation that have to do with you know listening to the perspectives of others and and being able to weigh in and respond and thinking about to what

01:02:45

extent those people's ideas align with or um conflict with your own thinking there are i would definitely say reading standards that can be hit through social annotation because

01:02:56

students are um you know identify sometimes summarizing and paraphrasing and making meaning of the arguments being made or whatever is being said they're also doing things like i showed in some of the examples where they're

01:03:09

pulling apart structure and those are all reading standards touching on rhetorical analysis or literary analysis in their noticings um and so all of those

01:03:20

get touched on i think for for right in terms of writing there are certain writing standards that have to do with like um digitally hyperlinking things that relate to the text and i think that's what's great about social annotation is

01:03:33

students can bring in links to outside sources or connections to other texts it's just so multimodal that you can do lots of things um that we don't often hit we don't often hit that writing standard like i feel like that's one of

01:03:46

the ones that we as english teachers tend to overlook and i think social annotation is great for that um you know if you wanted it to really hit some of those other writing standards then maybe you might want to add in some

01:03:57

sentence structure you know starters or supports that would like lead students in that direction if you had one you know standard in particular but i think it hits just about all of it i don't know about you joe and morgan um how you've approached um

01:04:10

looking at standards in relation to all of this but i think it supports the development of all so i'll just jump in thank you courtney i'll just jump in to say that uh i think that uh we talk a lot in my

01:04:25

in my school district and in my state about priority standards and what standards ought to be prioritized right and i think that you know social annotation can act as sort of like a counter counter

01:04:37

lever to some of the curricular trends that are that are frightening right so for example there's a new curriculum that's being adopted in our in our district that you know teachers are wary of because of because they've honed practices over

01:04:50

time and they don't want to be they don't want to have their teaching prescribed to them and i've heard second hand that this digital tool that the district has adopted um gives students a host of multiple

01:05:02

choice questions to answer after they do a first read and so the literacy educator that i've heard this from secondhand said you know that's not really an authentic first read the first read wouldn't you know

01:05:16

be asking students a lot of questions that would have a right or wrong answer i think that that's consistent with a lot of what we've heard courtney and morgan say and certainly i hope what you've heard me say is that

01:05:27

some of the some of the curricular trends are really trying to force you know notions of correctness and proficiency onto teachers and so i think that certain tools allow us

01:05:39

the flexibility as designers to say what ought to be a priority standard and i think that this old document that was created when the common core was released it was created in the national writing project by

01:05:51

joe wood from the area 3 writing project and what he did was he just went through and found all the standards that were highlighted there he highlighted any standard that made reference to digital writing what i would say is

01:06:05

you know over the years those have been de-prioritized because you know teachers are maybe unfamiliar with how somebody would use digital tools for writing right and so tradition

01:06:17

made us de-prioritize standards that we probably wanted to be prioritizing and certainly when everybody is forced to do a lot of digital writing and collaborative work online during a pandemic we can see why

01:06:29

a standard like one that asks us to i'll just uh choose the top one here um it says you know in 12th grade students should use technology including the internet to produce

01:06:47

publish and to update individual or shared writing projects in response to ongoing feedback including new arguments and information so i would argue that

01:06:59

that standard is really you know it's a should have a high priority priority um the idea that we're using technology tools in the internet to

01:07:11

write collaboratively while information is sort of being added to a text i mean i think that that's been de-prioritized and probably should be prioritized and i think most of the standards about digital writing have been

01:07:26

have been de-prioritized and should be highly prioritized moving forward i'm actually going to take an opposite approach um because i think that sometimes we become adversarial with standards and curriculum and there's

01:07:39

nothing we can do about it we have it we have to teach it we can't change it they don't answer that um but what i've learned is how can i do what they want me to do using the tools i want to use so for me something like social

01:07:52

annotation becomes a really good way to introduce the essay or to brainstorm for a writing assignment so we have to write about whatever thing we're writing about but we're going to start with this article

01:08:04

and we're going to socially annotate it and we're going to get all of our ideas together and then you're going to write the paper so that was us reading critically and that was us looking for textual evidence to support

01:08:15

and i think that it's more like i i tend to focus less on the things outside of my control um there's there's enough crazy in education i can't do anything about that what can i control in my

01:08:28

four walls and so i find how can i use this towards this end and that to me has been the the best thing about it is i'm still meeting my standards i'm still having them write this essay it just so happens that we are working

01:08:42

collaboratively on gathering our details for it because once the annotations are done they live there forever and i thought sometimes i don't care where you get the quotes for your asset because you're graded on how you

01:08:54

put those things together so if we go through and we socially annotate four articles and you have to write something that pulls those four articles and you happen to have your class annotations and conversations there

01:09:07

congratulations so that's my thing is like i don't make it a separate thing if i don't if i can't i just make it a part of the process you know maybe we're going to annotate our lead in so we're going to build

01:09:20

background knowledge using the annotation and that's building background knowledge so i think if you're in a place where it's rigorous or where it's very rigid use that system and figure out how the social annotations can fit into the

01:09:33

system you're doing because while they tell you you have to do it they don't tell you how you want to do it that's where we get to be creative and do what's in the best of our kids yes do students cite each other i saw

01:09:45

karen's quote question do students at each other yes if we're doing social annotations and it's coming from that they would cite it as so and so and such and such an article said or in such a such a discussion said that um if they're just

01:09:58

pulling a quote i've done things where i've had them work together to put in quotes if it's that type of thing where there's putting a quote from something they read collaboratively then i don't worry about them citing each other because it's from the book they read

01:10:10

but if they're using someone's idea they would cite the student whose idea you're using morgan that's great thank you so much for reminding us that you know it's our responsibility as educators to

01:10:22

interpret perhaps these standards or these other types of again curricular requirements and that social annotation is a very again dynamic way of of doing that

01:10:35

um i want to again leave some space for folks who again are attending we've jumped in our attendance from about a dozen folks when we began to well over 40 now so i know that we have some folks who perhaps

01:10:48

will revisit aspects of today's presentation we'll make sure that we have slides and resources curated following today's talk but i do want to make sure um as we're about 10 to 15 minutes out

01:11:02

with some final announcements if there are any questions or again other comments from attendees who want to bring those and again the q a is open but i'll just

01:11:13

keep rolling around did we address the question about middle school students um i know we saw it i think courtney mentioned it briefly um in terms of accommodations um i will say and and i mean this i hope

01:11:27

it comes across the way i mean it um annotations don't have to be like they're what you want them to be so in terms of accommodations made there's not really an accommodation that needs to be made for middle school

01:11:39

students or elementary students it's more so what do you want them to do so like your annotations are directed by you there are sometimes and i'll tell the students you just need to comment you know three annotations or other

01:11:51

times i want them specifically looking for i need one comment that connects this text to something else we've read um i kind of dictate what they're doing sometimes with their annotations so in terms of what you want to do with

01:12:04

middle schoolers maybe you do less maybe you do more maybe you give them more sentence starters but i think the biggest part is um it's kind of telling your students to write about anything and they're like well can i write about this and you're like

01:12:16

write about anything well what about this topic write about anything does it have to be school related write about anything the annotations are essentially whatever you want your students to do they could read something around an annotation for a memory it reminds them of you know

01:12:29

how does it connect them you could do it for text to text text connections one text to text one text to self one text world that would still be annotating so like i think that's my biggest thing is like in terms of accommodations you

01:12:42

as the educator are completely in control of how you want to do that so accommodate away because i will admit i make accommodations in my classes all the time there are times where first period i'm like okay this works and my

01:12:55

third time like actually we're gonna do it this way because i've realized that i could just let it let it go and i think that's the great thing about it is you don't have to have any preconceived ideas like just kind of tell them that's the

01:13:08

fun of it for me for annotations is to see what they come up with because a lot of times it's not stuff i ever expected morgan thank you for that um i'll just pick up there briefly and and recall a comment um from

01:13:23

federico who is in the session now in federico it's so again lovely to have you here thank you for joining us uh he had suggested that a question he poses to his students

01:13:34

who are not middle school students but i think that this question could be you know easily engaged in by middle school students is how did you feel while reading this and as a former middle school teacher i think that there are many middle

01:13:47

school students who would be able to provide a pretty compelling response to a question how did you feel while reading this text and then be able to use annotation as a way of sharing that response so so again

01:13:58

thank you morgan again federico for that suggestion as well um i'm looking at the clock and so i want to i want to throw this selfishly my last question into the mix here um because i again i just learned so much from all

01:14:11

three of you all the time but i just wanna on behalf of the ianate conference and hypothesis and the forty now seven folks who are in this session as it keeps growing um you know just thank you courtney and

01:14:23

morgan and joe for sharing so much with us this year um my last question is kind of a bit future focused and it recognizes the fact that you know we've come through the most challenging academic

01:14:35

year that i think any educator has has faced in their career for so many reasons um this year for you know reasons related to dual pandemics various crises all kinds of challenges

01:14:48

has probably been unlike anything that you courtney morgan and joe have ever experienced and yet here you all are taking you know time out of your you know much needed rest this summer to

01:15:00

jump into an academic conference and kind of educate all of us about you know again your wisdom when it comes to social annotation um and i'm curious to hear from all three of you about what you will carry forward

01:15:14

into this coming academic year as literacy educators i know that you all are kind of critically oriented and i'm interpreting that word critically in a variety of ways but you're all very critically oriented

01:15:28

educators i know that you think also very creatively about your pedagogy and that you care very deeply for your students and i would just love to hear from all three of you about

01:15:38

what you anticipate this next year might look like for you and what role if any social annotation or these kinds of collaborative meaning making approaches to literacy education what

01:15:53

might that look for you and for your students a few months from now as we emerge from this kind of covet academic year and we move into some new

01:16:04

space what what what what sense do you have of that right now i'll go um we revamped our i teach juniors and seniors we completely revamped our junior curriculum for this upcoming year so we have two

01:16:20

i'm at a private catholic school so it's overarching essential questions for the school year what does it mean to be an american and what does it mean to be a christian um i anticipate that social annotation is going to become

01:16:31

very very popular and used quite heavily just because given the scope of those questions i'm going to want to give them time as we read text and relate back to those topics as

01:16:44

we read um primary sources as a read expository text and relate back to that i'm going to want to give them time to formulate those ideas and really be

01:16:55

able to sit with where they are what they're thinking but also be able to see as the semester goes where their thinking may have grown and changed and developed i think that's a piece that i hadn't talked about earlier is if

01:17:08

we're socially annotating in the beginning throughout when we get you know we get to that point where they can go back and look at their annotations from august and see how they've changed because a lot of times you give that like how have you grown as a writer and a reader and a

01:17:21

person this semester and a lot of times they don't know like they don't have anything tangible to go back and look at like what was i thinking back in august they don't have that it's like we had discussions but i don't remember

01:17:33

what i said i don't remember what my thought process was this will actually give them something tangible to track their development and their thoughts throughout the school year so i'm excited about

01:17:44

them having that physical go back and look at these annotations where were you where are you now what accounts for that growth or that change why has it changed why hasn't it changed so that's that's where social annotation

01:17:57

is going to come into play really heavily for my juniors at least this school year as you're asking that question raymie i was thinking about the transition to this year right where we all had to re-envision

01:18:12

and rethink what could our classrooms look like um and i remember a lot of um new teachers in my department uh coming to me and saying they won't turn on their cameras they won't unmute like kind of freaking out and i was like why am i not freaked out

01:18:25

by that why am i not first of all i don't i don't think it's i don't need them to do those things but why is it that i'm comfortable with that but they're not and i think it's because of this idea that i was confident that i could find ways

01:18:39

across various platforms to make student thinking visible and it didn't have to be verbal um and i think social annotation played a major role in me being able to like ask students to do some thinking

01:18:51

and then i could pop in and i could see the interactions happening i could see their thinking developing in real time if they couldn't be there with us that day they could jump in later and see what you know what occurred

01:19:03

and i don't i don't want that to change um i would like to carry that over and i think there's a lot of um uncertainty still about next year our students know they will be going back full time in person but they're like i

01:19:16

just spent a year on my own like you know that that social aspect of being in school like you know it might be awkward it might be strange feeling and so i think using

01:19:28

social annotation to kind of ease in um as a way to kind of restart some interaction and give students an opportunity to quietly hear and share and you know and be

01:19:42

through social annotation is really important um i think back to a comment i saw earlier from one of my writing project colleagues denise medulli williams she said like as an introvert

01:19:54

i would feel so much more comfortable easing into conversation via social annotation and then maybe it would help me build up i think back to even one of the student comments i shared build up my that tangle of ideas i had

01:20:06

in my head you know and clarify it so that maybe if i do want to speak at some point then then we build on that um you know um as a result maybe of the social annotation

01:20:17

so i think it will play i don't think i will ease off of it you know just because we're not completely online anymore um i still see a lot of value in it and i still think it'll be a huge part of

01:20:31

our classroom culture and what we do um and so that won't change i don't know yeah for me i think that uh you know such a such a monumental shift in the

01:20:47

way schools um operated last year and i think that it's i still personally feel like i'm unpacking like you know what that meant for me like how it sort of like you know

01:20:59

reframed my teaching and sort of impacted me as you know certainly a teacher and in my relationships with students but also like how i thought about the school where i work and my job in general like to

01:21:12

suddenly have the apple cart upset in the ways it was and then have things like uh you know concerns about having cameras on etc like to me it's it's in it's in concert with concerns about learning loss

01:21:26

and uh the idea that um you know so certainly of course parents have appropriate concerns when their students haven't been going to school for a while face to face or you know learning online

01:21:39

has has not been proving to be you know something that students like or responding positively to in many cases but uh but i do think that you know i bring

01:21:51

concerns about deficitizing students during a time where i know students were learning a lot right and and so the idea that there's there's lots of learning for all of us and you know during a pandemic and

01:22:04

during the social um upheaval we've seen in the last year around issues of social justice so the idea that you know students are always reading reading the

01:22:15

world around them and certainly they have new literacies all the time and that there's all the you know all kinds of things to unpack together socially and literature can help us make

01:22:28

sense of those you know of the way we're you know learning throughout our lives especially in these tumultuous times like we've experienced and are still experiencing so literature is

01:22:41

you know is should aid us and the idea of like you know unpacking it together should be social should be fun should be positive for all of us

01:22:54

and that we can you know kind of create a counter narrative to sort of the the way we might want to label um learners from a with a a deficit

01:23:07

thank you joe so much and again also courtney and morgan we actually got one more quick question from our dear friend and colleague charisse charisse it's so lovely to see you here and and have you pop up in the questions here um charisse just wanted to ask quickly

01:23:21

both i think to morgan but to everyone and maybe this would be a kind of quick way of whipping around and mentioning a few quick platforms and pedagogies as we wrap up the session and then i have a few final little announcements right before we we closed today but charisse was

01:23:34

asking are you finding any particular preferences for again the alignment of social annotation platforms to certain pedagogies and you've all mentioned quite a few but maybe we could just kind of quickly whip

01:23:46

around one more time and mention some of those tools and pedagogies that you found really helpful and that'll help us to kind of have a final note in today's session before we move we move on and thank everybody once again

01:23:59

yeah i can start us off i think i mentioned this a little bit in my presentation but um definitely google docs was really great because it was already built into their universe right they were doing everything across

01:24:10

google so it was one easy place to go um and it allowed me to have access and view everything kind of all in one place uh students it almost functioned as like a discussion board

01:24:23

but on the text which i really appreciated so again like i said not taking the quotes or the ideas out of context and losing some of the nuance of you know what it's a part of was really important um but students self-reported

01:24:36

jamboard being the place that they really really enjoyed um they liked the flexibility they liked um they liked the variety of ways they could annotate

01:24:48

so not just a commenting um but they could add um videos or images or um you know highlight or circle or put you know they could do a lot of different things along with typing

01:25:02

you know a little sticky note or a response and so um those were kind of the two places that i focused on and students like i said self-reported they liked jamboard better for its flexibility and like it morgan spoke to earlier

01:25:14

maybe it resonated more with their natural kind of online engaging types of you know um ways that they like to in their normal everyday lives like to interact with each other so um those

01:25:26

were kind of the two places that i felt um i tend i work in google school so we do a lot of google stuff but i also use hypothesis um i am a huge fan of hypothesis and there was a brief conversation about deficit joe mentioned

01:25:41

um i particularly like hypothesis because i tend to see what we look at deficits of ability as deficits of opportunity or deficits of experience so hypothesis allows me to bring in articles to build

01:25:52

their background knowledge on things while annotating um as a writing an english teacher i find that we say like oh they can't write a thesis statement it's because they don't have enough information in their brains to synthesize

01:26:04

they read one text how do you synthesize one text so for me i like hypothesis because i like to bring in multiple articles so that when they're when they go to synthesize they have actually been to a variety of texts and they have more

01:26:17

to pull from so i like it for that aspect that i'm killing two birds with one stone because i really think that you know their deficit comes with opportunity and exposure to things not an ability at all

01:26:31

morgan thank you thank you so much joe you want to quickly chime in on this and then we're going to sure i would i would just say in the last year i found that that inst because we were you know students were were asked to use google for so much and

01:26:47

they're you know potentially inundated by email messages and messages about being behind right i think that's the worry that i would bring to everything is that if a student had been sort of struggling

01:26:58

to attend and they're also struggling to navigate you know this online learning world they'd be getting all these messages about you're behind you're behind and they'd be leading with apologies or explanations about what was

01:27:10

going on in their lives in my school was highly impacted attendance regular attendance was hard to maintain i really leaned on instant messenger tools that function like chats that could very quickly be

01:27:22

put together into chat rooms so that students would have chat rooms where they could you know converse with the three students they were getting along well with in class or they happen to attend on the same days

01:27:34

and so and also they could check in with me and give me sort of like emoji self-assessments on how they're doing emotionally and if they feel ready to you know to show up and jump back into school or if they're still just kind of processing how their world

01:27:47

has been potentially upended so i i appreciated the instant messenger and then the small group opportunity where students wouldn't have the affective concern about well there's 30 students registered for

01:27:59

this class only three of whom i know and i'm feeling behind so i'm hesitant to share that's so powerful um thank you so so much i um really wanna i just

01:28:14

thank again so much uh everything that we've learned today and everything that we will continue to sit with and think about because of again the wisdom shared by morgan

01:28:25

by courtney by joe um there's been a lot of commentary here in the chat there's also been a lot of activity on twitter so i apologize that i've seen it a little distracted but somebody tweeted out something like the students and the families

01:28:38

you know of all three of you are just so lucky to have educators who are thinking this creatively and this critically about literacy education and leveraging something like social annotation

01:28:50

to really make a difference again in the lives of students and their learning and so thank you so much for for contributing to this um you can find morgan and courtney and joe on twitter

01:29:04

pretty easily i think that their handles are actually included their twitter handle's in the i annotate program we will make sure to as long as it's okay with them to get access to

01:29:15

slide decks so those those slides can be linked uh through the i annotate program as well again this is kind of the middle of day two of a week long i annotate with education sessions and

01:29:28

speakers on all five days and so i hope um that if you found this session uh inspiring that you continue to hang out at i annotate throughout the week um we we look forward to

01:29:40

crossing paths in a variety of spaces as we think again about the importance of social reading and social writing as it relates to student learning thank you all so much for joining us today

01:29:52

uh and for being a part of our session and again thank you so much morgan and courtney and joe be well everybody and enjoy your time at i annotate take care

01:30:11

you