News:

Welcome to the new (and now only) Fora!

Main Menu

How to distribute this material to the class?

Started by Hegemony, September 12, 2019, 10:41:02 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

LibbyG

Maybe in requiring a hard copy you can collect them and grade the annotations? Lots of language of "I want to ensure that you're on the right track for this high-stakes assignment." Maybe that's a deliverable that feels less punitive than other approaches.

And maybe reading their annotations will actually tell you something useful about how they encounter the material.

wuggish

If this is true for your material, you can emphasize that if they print it themselves, they control the format. They can put it in a binder, folder, or use staples, print one-sided or double-sided, print two pages per sheet, etc. These things make a difference in reading comfort and the utility of a text, and it's nice to have that control. (As a student, I hated being given a course reading pack of research papers printed one page per sheet, one-sided, even though it was free.) Of course, this would require them to have been reading enough in general to have developed preferences.

rhetoricae

Can your campus bookstore do Print-on-Demand? Or a local copy shop that handles custom texts?  When I was an undergrad (way back in the dark ages), we had a fair number of custom texts that we had to purchase at the local copyshop for a nominal fee.

Another, more tech-oriented possibility is https://web.hypothes.is/, an online annotation tool which can be used either group or individually, and supports annotating webpages, publicly-available Google Docs, and PDFs. There's a lot more information on their site & in their FAQ.

Deacon_blues

I have used  https://web.hypothes.is/ in the classroom, and it is an excellent, free tool for group annotation (once the students get the hang of it).  But I don't know that it would necessarily work well for a text that has a glossary at the end.  I may be old fashioned, but I think a hard copy would be much more easy to work with for that sort of thing.