Annotate This...

This year our campus is embracing literacy strategies across content areas.  Our campus instructional coach, Lena Atherton, recently published a blog post with some reflections and ideas on "literacy for life."

In her post, Lena talks states that "writing is thinking put to paper."  Specifically, one way for students to 'get' the content is to have them annotate it.  I, like Lena tend to annotate content naturally...well, it's become automatic for me over the years.  Not so for our students.  Many students don't know how...they've never been taught and/or if they have, they have a tendency to push back against annotating because (as Lena puts it), "it hurts their brains."

So...the wheels starting turning.  How can I incorporate annotation into my content?  Much of my content is taught through instructional videos (I'm learning to flip my classroom!).  But...what if I taught the students how to annotate the videos and the content on our class Wikispace?  What would that look like?

Right now, I'm not sure.  I'm going to give it a try though.  I already have my students create reflective blog posts in a concerted effort to get them writing.  I think I'm ready to take on this next challenge and teach them to annotate the course content.

Annotation...here we come!