Text mark-up faculty consultation report

Faculty met over lunch on Thursday, April 7 to explore how technology might assist us with that time-honored task of grading student written work. We were looking for ways that faculty can comment on student writing, for students to annotate texts, and for all of us to make the work-flow of collecting, marking up, and returning work more efficient and ecologically responsible. The session was lively and lots of experiences were shared, including the following.

• Lee Forester (DMCL) demonstrated how he uses the free Revisions tool from MSU in his German class to comment on student writing assignments (http://clear.msu.edu/revisions/)
• Barry Bandstra (Religion) demonstrated how his students annotate biblical texts in class using their laptops. The pdf is distributed as a Moodle resource which the student downloads. After annotation, the student uploads the pdf using the "Upload a single file" within the Assignment activity. Mac annotation is done with the free Preview application, which comes loaded with the Mac OS. PC annotation is done with the free PDF-XChange Viewer program (http://www.docu-track.com)
• Other possible ways to annotate text: Track Changes in MS Word and Google docs.

Rumor has it that the iPad might be useful for text annotation, but nobody in attendance brought one to demo. Thanks to Tom Ludwig, here is a link to a short list of useful iPad apps -- http://chronicle.com/article/The-iPad-for-Professors-/126885/ including something called iAnnotate. Some other apps came up in the discussion, though not related to text mark-up:

• Prezi (http://prezi.com) for engaging presentations, free, going way beyond powerpoint
• Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/) for short instructional videos
• iShowU (http://www.shinywhitebox.com/ishowuhd/main.html) for screen capture movies

This was the last of three ACAT sponsored faculty consultations on emerging technologies for the Spring 2011 semester. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed in a future faculty consultation, send a note to bandstra@hope.edu.