Perusall is a social annotation tool that allows students and faculty to interact with reading materials, images, videos, and podcasts in a style akin to social media. Instead of reading a document and engaging with it via a separate discussion thread, Perusall brings the discussion to the text. Instructors can upload their own content and/or adopt a course textbook through the platform. After making assigned materials available in the platform, students and Instructors can comment, highlight, share notes, and create threaded discussions directly within the shared text.
Features:
- Allows for collaborative annotation within and around a shared text or website.
- Offers options for individual or group comments and note sharing.
- Gives students/instructions the ability to organize concepts, responses, and discussion themes via hashtags.
- Enables multi-media annotation possible via videos, images, external linking, etc.
- Presents a dashboard for uploaded documents/linked websites for easy navigation organization, engagement analysis.
Benefits:
- Provides an avenue for formal or informal interaction with course content.
- Creates a space for low-stakes discussion surrounding web-based resources within and around that resource.
- Offers exportable snapshots for collections of quotations and figures.
- Provides granular information about student interactions with content, including engagement time, “confusion reports,” posting frequency and downloadable csv files of all student annotations within a text.
- Makes content accessible through option to “read aloud” in multiple languages
