Inspired by a need to mark up some of my beautiful cookbooks with recipe adaptations (and at the same time not really wanting to wreck their pristine nature), I decided to look at creating digital annotations for physical books. Within my presentation, a Weebly site, I explored some of the current options out there and suggested ways in which there is still room for improvement, especially where mobility is concerned.
Thanks in advance for checking it out!
https://mobileannotation.weebly.com/
Hi James,
Thanks for your website! I think the idea of annotating physical books is great, and creates a lot of flexibility to note taking. I’ve downloaded a lot of APPs in the past, mainly to help with my work, because I would find myself having to take notes on physical handouts, and my iPad at the same time. I’ve tried GoodNotes and Notability, they both can allow you to take a picture of a physical paper, and then write on it. I have to say, There hasn’t been one that I’ve kept up using because none has been truly convenient. I wanted to use it because I didn’t want to have lots of paper copies everywhere, and I also wanted to be able to access my files anywhere. But after weeks of trying to write the annotations, I eventually went back to just typing on my computer for note taking, as it appeared much cleaner and easy to read and access.
I think for students, it would be really good to challenge them to try out digital annotation, but I would suggest it’s best on a larger device like a tablet with a stylus if it is to be written.
Hi James,
Thanks for your project. I found your website to be clear and well organized. The videos are insightful and add to the topic well. This topic made me reflect on different ways that students can take notes and how to encourage them to seek out multiple sources. When students and I are working on research projects, I certainly have encountered many of my students defaulting to Google or other online search engines and don’t consider books/resources we have in the libraries (both school and community). I think we have little ways to go (as you have identified some gaps with the current technology), but it can be an incredibly powerful learning tool.
Well done!
Hi James,
I think this idea is incredibly useful. My cookbooks are more like coffee table books. The photos and stories that are also included are beautiful, and I do want to preserve them.
I use post-it’s on my pages, but this would be much better because then you can create your mobile cookbook full of recipes that you have tested. Even more to that fact, I could not believe how many people jumped on the sourdough bread bandwagon during the lockdown. You can curate your digital recipes and not have to scroll through people’s posts for ideas. This keeps the cookbooks out of the kitchen where they could get messed up with writing or food spillage. This made me think of my grandmother’s recipe tin from my childhood. If she were still around, I would have loved to share the new mobile way to store and annotate her cherished collection.
Thanks for allowing me to travel down memory lane.
Hi Kristin,
I’m glad you found it useful. My food blog was actually started as a way for me to make changes to recipes and store them. My first recipes would link to online sources, and then the actual post would just talk about the modifications that I’d made…and that itself was inspired by my mom and the recipe book that she put together. Each sibling got a binder full of recipes that my mom had typed out, gathering them from various sources and committing them to digital form. I have to admit though, that I’ve marked up that binder of recipes a bit myself, making modifications as if it were an old textbook.
As for sourdough, I definitely jumped on the bandwagon as well…and it was delicious.
Hi James, I really appreciated the flow of your information and the demonstration videos that you created. Your work provides a great overview of some of the tools that are currently available in an approachable manner – it is something I feel I could share with my colleagues who are looking for suggestions for annotation programs. I find it so interesting that there are options that include different aspects but not one that combines it all together.
Something that I found last year in my class was that students shy away from using books to do any research and prefer to do it all online, and there are some great books out there that are fantastic resources. Annotation tools, like you’ve suggested, bridge the gap between books and technology and can help strengthen research skills. A potential extension for your all encompassing annotation app would be to include a tutorial for note-taking and annotations – for you, what would be your big annotation suggestion for students who are new to it?
Hi Julia,
It is so important for developers of tech tools to extol the virtues of their technology and promote their use, so definitely I think that any technology out there focused on annotation should itself help to teach the skill. As for a suggestion for annotation, I have to admit that I am by no means an expert…but I’d probably suggest developing shorthand code for commonly used terms. When annotating, there has to be an emphasis on brevity, and shorthand codes would do that.
Thanks for checking out my project, and I’m glad you were able to take something from it.
Hi James,
I loved how easy your website was to navigate and the videos were great demonstrations of the current technology and what is lacking in them. Even though the current technology is not perfect, thanks to you, it has inspired me to implement some of these programs with my students for one of our Social Studies units next year (and then hopefully a perfected version comes out in the near future)! I think the game changer will be your suggestion where handwritten notes can be converted into digital form, I guess we just need an AI program capable of reading everyone’s writing, including my chicken scratch! We don’t want students to lose the ability to hand-write notes as the act of physically writing down notes has shown that it aids with retention so this would be the ideal solution. An added bonus is that this may encourage students to get back into libraries to conduct research again and not just rely solely on Google!
Thanks for a great presentation!
Hi Juliano,
Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad you were able to find something directly applicable to your classroom now. I definitely think that once you take out the desire for mobile capabilities, there are some really great products already out on the market, which I absolutely made use of during my first course within this program (it had a lot of assigned readings). As for the AI capability to read writing, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is getting pretty good at reading hand-printed text, so I’m excited to see how that advances over time and how much computers will be able to learn to recognize and decode and individual’s writing based on an ever-growing set of samples. I have to be honest though, that I haven’t done much research into that side of things yet, aside from knowing that it isn’t currently implemented within the current annotation tech available.
As for your point about libraries, I definitely think it will be great for students to get off of their laptops more and into books, even if just to give them a change of pace.
Hi James,
Loved your website and the idea of mobile annotation. You provided a review and demo of three apps that are currently on the market and clearly indicated the gaps that still have yet to be filled. Your project reminds me of Reading Apprenticeship, which is a framework that focuses on improving literacy. I have been learning about RA for two years now and I have also found a gap in mobile annotations to support RA. (https://readingapprenticeship.org/)
I think about how technology needs to develop to support apps such as OneNote to allow for mobile annotation. Do we need large mobile screens, easily accessible stylus for writing? What do you think needs to change in technology to allow for this to be possible?
Overall I enjoy the flow of your website, videos and length of the project. It was easy to read, understand and visually appealing!
Hi Katlyn,
Thank you for your review – I really appreciated the kind words and I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Your mention of Reading Apprenticeship reminds me of when I taught Science 7 back in the day, where I was exposed to the ways in which annotation could be used to express student understanding. Instead of having students summarize a section of reading themselves through simple written output, they would simply highlight sections of text pertaining to given questions and make commentaries in the margins (actually, I think we photocopied the reading pages onto oversized pieces of paper so that there was plenty of blank space). It was a way for students to practice not only finding information, but showing proof of where that information was located. They couldn’t simply guess at the answer, because it would be very obvious if the text they selected had little to do with what was being asked. As for assessment, it was incredibly easy to see if students were grasping the concept because even from across the classroom you could see if the correct portions of the text were being highlighted. That experience increased my fascination with annotation at the ways it could help students learn and improve their literacy levels.
As for your question about what needs to be developed technologically to support this sort of mobile annotation, I don’t know if there’s much more than can be done from the hardware side aside from all mobile devices eventually coming with a stylus. I think we’ve pushed the boundaries for screen sizes already. Some are becoming so big that they become a nuisance to carry around as you would a traditionally smaller cell phone. Aside from the sort of software functionality that I suggested (taking text written on a page and converting it to a digital form), I think everything else is in place for a well-designed program…it just has to be created now. That being said, I hope we eventually get to the day, like with cell phones, where having a larger tablet pc of some sort is so commonplace that they are considered truly mobile devices.