In this post, I discuss the use of two tools for supporting online reading and annotation, which can serve as powerful ways to do close reading in classrooms (Johnson, 2014): Scrible and Diigo. Both tools allow users to mimic pen and paper annotation in online environments, with some limitations. For a short screencast showing the very basics of these tools, click here.
Scrible
Scirble is an online annotation tool that allows
readers to mark up articles they read online. It features sub-tools that mimic
analogue instruments such as pens and highlighters, and that function similarly
to those found in PDF editors. For those of you familiar with annotating in a
common downloadable program like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Scrible is actually much
easier to use. I’ll get into the technical features and how to set it up
shortly, but first let’s cover the basics. When you open a webpage with
Scrible, you get a toolbar at the bottom of the page that looks like this:
The tools contained in this image allow readers to:
- Share articles with others (presumably once they have been annotated)
- Highlight text
- Add notes in the style of a Post-It
- Change the color of text
- Underline text
Once students have finished annotating, they can save their annotated
page to the Scrible library. An annotated page might look something like this:
These annotated pages can be shared with other readers,
referred to as Collaborators on the Scrible site, who can make their own
comments or respond to the comments of the original annotator, allowing two
readers to engage in collaborative discussion or annotation of a text via the
web, which can increase comprehension and understanding (Fischer & Frey, 2012).
The Scrible library allows readers to store webpages chosen
for particular purposes or inquiries in its library. You might also teach students to use a tool
like Evernote to export annotated texts outside of the web browser. Readers
can easily access previously read sites and make comparisons between texts, either within the
Scrible website or after exporting to another program.
So, how do readers access Scrible? Scrible can be added as an extension to web browsers
like Chrome, or, for those who are weary of adding too many extensions, you can use an easy workaround: adding the site to your bookmarks bar
(this is what I did). Either method you choose allows you to open a website on
your own, and then click the Scrible button to begin annotation (sometimes you
have to sign in to your Scrible account before you can annotate). Here’s what
the button looks like on my bookmarks bar:
There are a few limitations to this tool, however. You can’t
add text directly onto the page; the
annotations are limited to highlighting, underlining, changing text color, and
adding text in the form of virtual sticky notes. And while the Scrible library
is passable and other tools can be used to export annotated pages, there is no
built in way to, say, export an annotated page as a PDF. In a world inundated
with online tools and accounts, it’s a bit of a pain to add on any more than
you have to. And when you’re working with students, this can really become
burdensome. Working with 150-200 kids’ accounts can get messy quickly, and
depending on what other systems you have at hand, it might be easier to access
documents outside of the Scrible system.
Diigo
Diigo is a similar online annotation tool. Students can install it as a browser extension which creates a button next to their web
search bar that allows annotation on a website that they're already on. In
contrast to the visible toolbar in Scrible, Diigo is nearly invisible. Instead,
readers use the cursor to highlight text in an article, which causes an
annotation toolbar to appear:
Using this toolbar, readers can highlight text, attached
virtual sticky notes, or share text to social
networking sites like Twitter. Like with Scrible, readers can not, add text directly to the webpage as they would using pen and paper.
Diigo automatically saves annotations to its webpage, which
can be accessed later, either by individual annotation or by pulling up the full
text of a website. On the Diigo site, readers can also annotate uploaded PDFs
and use outlining tools. Teachers looking at text structures could use these
tools to help students identify aspects of writing online with a collapsible
outlining tool that allows them to switch between reading and making comments
on an outline.
Like Scrible, and like any digital tool, Diigo is not
perfect. Neither tool allows readers to add their own text to a page, a severe
limitation for those of us who want to use these tools to promote close reading and metacognition (it's so much easier when you can see the results of your thinking right there next to the author's text!).
Let's talk about the libraries these pages get saved to for a minute. In contrast to Scrible’s drab but clear library
page, Diigo’s is more colorful and busy, showing readers some of their
annotations from the moment the page is opened:
While this previewing of annotations may serve useful to some students, I
found that it cluttered up the page and made it more difficult to organize
multiple documents. If you are thinking of using this tool to promote online inquiry or comparing documents, I would advise trying them out for yourself (or having your students test-drive them) and making a call based on what seems to work best in your context.
As with Scrible, readers using Diigo can not easily
export full versions of their annotated documents to formats like PDF, Word, or
Google Docs. They can easily tweet or e-mail links to these documents in Diigo,
but the tools works to keep you functioning within its ecosystem.
To me, these limitations prevent either tool from
functioning as fully as they could throughout a writing process, and make it
more difficult for readers and students to integrate the work and learning they
do annotating webpages with other documents like PDFs, photographs, or scanned
pages. However, online reading takes many forms, and either Diigo or Scrible
can be used to support active, close reading in online spaces, allow readers to save
articles that might otherwise be lost to time after a webpage is closed, and
consequently, to return to, re-read, and compare documents, all aspects of
close reading advocated by teacher-scholars (Fischer & Frey, 2013).
