Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework allows us to understand the importance of utilizing web 2.0 in teaching and learning. Social annotation tools such as Hypothes.is allow teachers to fulfil the three essential UDL components: engagement, representation, and action & expression through thoughtful use of the platform.

Social annotation tools such as Hypothesis and Voice Thread, when used well, boost student engagement, enhance critical thinking, expand reading comprehension, and increase student interaction. Of the several social annotation tools currently available, our institution uses Hypothesis. Hypothesis’ motto—“Making reading active, visible and social”—sums up why we think social annotation is so valuable for our students: it engages students and invites them to read and think together as a group by sharing real-time annotations of websites or PDFs (Hypothesis, 2021). The richly multimodal, interactive nature of Hypothesis offers instructors a platform through which they can employ the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to improve engagement and accessibility for all learners.

Annotating is a great way to capture and record your thoughts as you interact with a reading material which can be a text document, a web page, a PDF, an image or even a video. It offers you a deeper level of engagement with text and is one of the efficient strategies for close and critical reading.  Annotating, as Porter-O’Donnell (2004) stated, is “a writing-to-learn strategy for use while reading or re-reading…[It] helps readers reach a deeper level of engagement and promotes active reading. It makes the reader’s “dialogue with the text” (Probst) a visible record of the thoughts that emerge while making sense of the reading” (p. 82).

To define annotation it is when you add notes, comments or opinions about a piece of writing,  or a drawing, photo, or diagram. Often these are critical explanations to add extra insight about something. These explanations can be necessary to understanding writings in which the language might be difficult to make sense of without clarification.