


As you annotate, you’ll also want to add keywords, phrases, or questions, and make connections to the content. Highlighting tells you that you thought something was important in the moment you read it, but when you go back later, you won’t know why you thought it was important. The simplest ways to annotate include marking up the text by highlighting, underlining, bracketing, or placing symbols in the text or the margins, but simply highlighting is insufficient. It can increase comprehension, help you remember what you’ve read, and save you time by not requiring you to re-read as often. To annotate is to actively engage a text by pausing to reflect, mark up, and add notes as you read. Explain strategies for annotating texts.Have students respond creatively to their reading with their own poetry or prose or visual art as annotations.

Have students research a topic or theme and tag and annotate relevant texts across the Internet.Have students explore the Internet on their own with some limited direction (find an article from a respectable source on a topic important to you personally), exercising traditional literacy skills (define difficult words, identify persuasive strategies, etc.).Have students annotate with images and video or integrate images and video into other types of annotations.Have students share their personal opinions on a controversial topic as discussed by an article.Have students mark and explain the use of rhetorical strategies in online articles or essays.Have students identify formal textual elements and broader social and historical contexts at work in specific passages.Have students highlight, tag, and annotate words or passages that are confusing to them in their readings.Have students look up difficult words or unknown allusions in a text and share their research as annotations.Pre-populate a text with questions for students to reply to in annotations or notes elucidating important points as they read.Potential uses from Back to School with Annotations: It also helps add complexity to documents and media by adding an extra layer to them.

Annotation is a useful tool to foster interaction, collaboration, and critical thinking.
