Brent Warner
This is the higher ed tech podcast, season two episode 18, annotating tools and the future format of your class.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s higher ed tech podcast. I’m Tim van Norman instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome, we’re glad you’re here with us. So last time, I talked about the fact that I would be moving between episodes. And yes, I am now in a new location. So I don’t know if this is going to help or hurt as far as the sound is concerned, but I am a 45 minute drive away from where I was before. So South Orange County now not North Orange County, yeah, much closer to work. But you know, a little different,

Brent Warner
some, some growing pains and the adjustments of moving right.

Tim Van Norman
If you’ve ever moved, you know exactly what my pains are right now, having just finished it last weekend. So

Brent Warner
yes, I was thinking, normally when you move like, you can invite some friends to help you and like pay them in pizzas and things like that. But I feel like it’s probably not a very comfortable time to ask friends to like, I don’t know, if you did like maybe one or two. But like, you might have a party and like get a bunch of people.

Tim Van Norman
You know, we’d love to do an open house. But how do you do an open house with nobody? Yeah, yeah. So COVID we’re hoping that maybe the summer, this fall sometime soon, we’ll be able to invite friends over so they can see that new house been? And all those good things. So

Brent Warner
yeah. Well, here we are. So we’re talking about annotation tools today. And we’re also going to be talking about switching over and kind of bringing things back when you move back to online. So let’s jump over to the first segment. All right, annotation tools. So Tim, annotation tools are all over the place, right there. There’s lots of different things, and they’ve existed in different forms. But I think recently, it seems to me it’s taken a real long time for like a good annotation tools to show up online for whatever reason, and it’s not. Ultimately it doesn’t seem like it’s that complicated of a technology. But like for years and years, it was like, there’s you can’t just do the same thing as writing a note on the edge of a piece of paper. Right? Or, or giving quick feedback about it is getting there pretty a lot better now than it used to be.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, and it’s something that people are asking about, I literally had, I think two or three different conversations this week, about this type of topic and and how do I annotate my students papers? How do I have students annotate something so that they can, they can demonstrate knowledge, or something like that, and understand in some ways, we also have to talk about commenting tools. Because as people are talking about annotate, annotate can mean drawing as well as just simply commenting. So understand that as we’re talking about this, there’s a lot of nuances even to the language that we use for this.

Brent Warner
Well, I think we have to start with, you know, the bane of my existence, but you but, you know, it’s it’s the oldest and the most well known, which is, you know, our good old friend Adobe, right? Adobe Acrobat, right? And annotating. Let’s start off just, let’s give them their do their due process, because it matters. And people use it, even though I was complaining to you earlier.

Tim Van Norman
Oh, you know, it, it’s on almost every computer, it’s free, really easy to install a really easy to use once you understand it. But remember what I said just a minute ago, when we talk about annotation tools, we’re also talking about commenting it Adobe doesn’t call it annotating, they call it commenting. And so if you’re thinking annotation, you’re never gonna find it, right. If you’re thinking, commenting, then you’ll find it and you can do stuff with it. So turning it on trying it out, as in every tool we’re going to talk about, try it before you need it. Make sure that you understand how it works. Because if you have to have it right now, that’s the wrong tool for you. I don’t care what it is. Yeah. So just make sure and try it before you tell your students see. Make sure it does the way you want it to do what you want it to do.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and so for me, you know, Tim, I I showed it to you I’d share shared screen and I don’t know why it does this every time I open up a PDF, it gives it like a load thing and needs to load the process. And, and I know you said, Hey, that doesn’t happen to me. And so it’s like, of course it doesn’t happen. See, I’m

Tim Van Norman
on Windows. So I don’t know if Yeah, that’s a Mac feature.

Brent Warner
Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a bonus, you pay extra for it to the time to breathe, to breathe freely, right. But, but I also do find it non intuitive is my problem. So So the way that they have it set up, I’m like, I don’t I don’t think in that way and their organizational structure for like, how you choose different tools or like how you choose things. To me, I find that bothersome. And so I think it’s good that we found a couple of different things that we can also play with alternatives, right? So hey, right, if you need if you need Adobe, if you’ve got it, if it’s free, if you know how to use it wonderful. But there’s also some other great things that are coming out and and different ways to interact with things as well. So let’s start off with the first one, which is Kami. And Kami is a it’s a PDF annotator that’s built right into your Chrome browser. I mean, it’s a it’s a, it’s an Chrome extension, I guess, essentially. And so what it does is it lets you load whatever file you want into Google Drive or into OneDrive, or whatever it is that you’re using as a PDF. And then you can really quickly and easily draw directly on to that paper. So if it’s a PDF, it’s fine. I think it also converts everything into things. But it’s right there on top of the, you know, whatever you’re loading in. And so if you just want to draw a quick little comment, if you want to draw squares and boxes, there’s some upgrade features, including equations, which I know we talked about for our math teachers who want some of those tools as well. I think that’s an upgrade need, but leaving comments, marking up the papers, all of those types of things. It is simple. And the reason why this is so easy to work with, I think Tim is because it’s actually designed for K 12. And if you think of the K and K 12. Like they’re really talking about kids like like kindergarten, right, it’s being able to use this thing and to draw on it. And so, for me, that is a smart setup, where it’s like, Hey, you know, hey, dummy, you can do the thing, right.

Tim Van Norman
And if you want to have your students drawing something, understand that they’re gonna be drawing with a mouse or touchpad, unless you’ve got something that will allow touch screen, and a pen, or stylus. But this can do that very, very easily. And so you could draw molecules if you really wanted to, it’s designed for, for commenting, so comments will show off, show off to the right, and stuff like that. But you can do even simple, very simple but simple drawings on this to, to communicate, either have your students to it or for you to communicate with your students.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And there are some upgrade features, where the comments can include your voice or video right on to the PDF. So you can like just record yourself talking about certain points. I think one of the real things that people like about this is that, you know, hey, I spent all these years as a teacher, I’ve got all these PDFs, I’ve got all these things that I’ve printed out over the years, right. And I just want my students to be able to interact with them in the same ways as they used to do now. I think we could have a whole long conversation about why we need to upgrade our actual approach to technology and what we’re doing. But I totally get it like, hey, I’ve got these documents, they’ve worked well. My students learn how can I just get them to interact with them on the computer screen the same way I did when I put it on their desk in front of them, right, and they’re and i and i think Kami is a really good option for for doing things like that, where it’s like, Hey, here’s a quadrant of four boxes, draw your four different pictures, each of the lifecycle of the plant growing or whatever it is. This is a great and easy way to do it. And so it’s Kami, kamihq.com, it’s actually I’m going to be pedantic here Tim it’s actually (pronounced) Kami because Kami comes from the Japanese word for “paper” but but everybody calls it that. So it’s it’s Kami HQ. And it is pretty cool. And then there but there’s the free version, of course in the upgrade version, and the upgrade version, of course is better. As you as you go, but I do hope Yes, but the I will say that the free version covers quite a lot of what you would basically need like if you’re, if you’re just saying hate basic interactions, getting the getting the simple parts covered for me. It’ll probably get you there with what you need. And then I think the the teacher plan, it’s $100 it’s 99 bucks a year. Adds on top of a lot of extra features with it, including things like you can you can use, like dictionaries and text to speech and speech to text. And and, you know, it can integrate into Canvas, I think with that higher level version. So anyways, get started with the free version and play with it, see if it works for your basic needs. And then if you’re looking for more, well, Tim, maybe we can see about the school or district version, if that’s something that people really want. But yeah,

Tim Van Norman
so the next one I wanted to talk about is hypothesis. This we, I heard about a year or so ago, somebody brought it up asked about it. This allows you to annotate websites. So the last one we talked about Kami was really good about documents themselves, specifically, PDF documents. This allows you to create annotations on a newspaper website, or something like that. So that you can interact with your students at a different level, about that particular site. So you can explain something maybe that you want them to read this site that read these this page, but maybe they aren’t going to understand a phrase. So you can put a comment off to the side, you can draw it you can put a picture in there’s a lot of different things that you can do with this so that it can enhance your student’s ability to, to understand that site.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And, Tim, I want to kind of clarify this, because it’s a little hard to get your head around it. First of all, like, how do you just go in and go in and annotate a website, right? The structure, I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, or if you’re if you remember if I’m wrong here, but I think the structure is basically you kind of log into hypothesis in a phrase, in a sense, and then you’re like, Hey, I’m in Tim’s class. And then, and then it’s like, hey, here are the different ones. And you as a student could add a website and say, like, let’s let let me go annotate this website. But then it connects back to kind of the class as the base level, right? So. So it’s tracking which what who you’re interacting with is like your teachers and students and classmates, but also it links into whatever sites you’ve been working with together, right?

Tim Van Norman
It basically puts a overlay on the site, right? And so you’re looking at the overlay the site muted, and then the overlay the thing that’s over it at the same time. So it doesn’t give the person it’s not changing the website itself. Right? It is only it’s giving that overlay so that you, you see the website through this other lens through hypothesis, which is really nice, because it also allows you to work in groups. And so a group can annotate a website or, or something like that all together and work together on this particular project, rather than it only being one person and everybody sees what this one person says.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So. So hypothesis is a good one. And I know we have one or two teachers that work with it quite a bit. And so I think maybe we can dig deeper in the future and kind of bring them on the show to hopefully to share some of their thoughts and experiences with it as well.

Tim Van Norman
It’d be nice. Yes, yeah.

Brent Warner
So the last one is, so we talked about annotating on PDFs, we talked about kind of annotating the web. And now the last one is annotating your screen on your computer. So I found this today, actually, Tim is called demo Pro. And there’s a few different things out there that maybe do similar things. But this one is really simple and clean. Basically, it’s an annotator on your monitor, right. And so it just draws over whatever else you’ve got going on. So you can have three different applications open and you can draw over all three of them at the same time. It’s a really simple tool, it’s just a click and hate, you’ve got the you got the pen drawing whatever it is that you’re gonna draw, you got your arrow or your circles or whatever it is you’re going to do. But that’s about it. And so for me, if with my class, maybe I’ve got my second monitor set up, right, and I’m screen sharing my second monitor, but I’ve got like, my canvas shell on half of the page, and I’ve got, you know, the Kindle book that we’re reading on the other half of the page. And then I can draw lines back and forth or I can say like, highlight this word, and then remember to go and do it in this activity over here. And so I really am quite happy. It’s called demo Pro. It’s very simple. There are a few other things that do similar things. I did not find a PC version for this. I don’t know if you did.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say when I looked it up and verified what you had told me before. It is only for Mac. And it does not appear to even work for iPad, which was interesting. Hopefully they’ll have some enhancements soon. But it is really as you were demonstrating it to me before It’s a really neat way of quickly annotating something on your screen drawing attention to a specific spot, and then wiping it out moving on to the next thing. Yeah, yeah. So it can continue with that. It’s really nice that way.

Brent Warner
So if you’re on a Mac, demo Pro, and it’s two bucks, that’s a great price. Like, I actually prefer that to free in certain ways. Because I’m like, Hey, I’m throwing the maker, a couple bucks, like they realize there’s some value to it. But it’s also a really light tool. And so you know, two bucks, easy, and happy to have it. Alright, Zippy tip. So Tim, we’re talking about group tabs in Chrome, this is a fairly new feature. Basically, all you do is inside, if you got a bunch of tabs, I am a tab monster, as Tim can see is I’ve got my screen here. And some people get super stressed out when they look at my computer screen, which I understand. But I’ve got like 100 tabs open, right. And so what you can do is, you can go to any tab that you like, and you can right click on it now. And then you can add, you can click on a little drop down menu that says Add tab to new group. And you can make a whole group of whatever it is that you’re looking for. So for example, maybe you want a set of tabs based on the class that you’re going to be teaching later today, right. And so you just build all your tabs, and you load them all into a group tab. That would be for example, in my class, ESL ad, right, and then I have quick access to it, they’re all grouped together as one. And I can kind of slow down the load of having a bunch of different tabs that are all pulling processing power, depending on how it’s set up.

Tim Van Norman
So right and, and you can also pull that out of the your, of the browser and use it outside of the browser, you know, in a separate browser just for that group.

Brent Warner
Yeah, new window to

Tim Van Norman
Allah is one time. So it’s a really nice feature that way.

Brent Warner
Awesome. So group tabs in Chrome. Alright, so Tim, we’ve been talking a little bit, I mentioned to you that I was in a conversation recently with some other higher ed teachers, and we were having this conversation of like, you know, what are you going to be bringing back with you now you’ve been teaching online, you’ve been doing all these things. And so, so we started saying, well, let’s, let’s talk about that, right. We’ve taught online for a year, and now the real conversation is, hey, schools starting to open up, right? You’re, you’re starting to see teachers showing showing up and like, maybe peeking their heads around the corners of buildings, and like, Is it cool for me to be here and all those things. But the reality is we’re looking at teachers coming back for sure, in fall, at some level and probably much heavier in the spring. I know anyone who’s listening to us from K 12. They’re like, Oh, whatever. We’ve already been going back for a while. But but this is us, and this is our reality right now. So we’re looking at going back. And I think it’s a great conversation to kind of understand like, Well, you’ve learned a bunch of stuff, right? You have like, you’ve you’ve found things that work and you found things that didn’t work, right. And so, so we want to talk about the future format of your class. And this is just kind of more of a theoretical conversation, not not necessarily specific tools and everything, but maybe some tools, but we’ll see. So Tim, what are you thinking about here?

Tim Van Norman
Well, so understand. Also, we’re saying your classes going to look like in fact, we’re saying the opposite? What is your class going to look like? You, Brent, you taught online, I’m sorry, you taught online for the last year. But prior to that, you really, you use tools that were online, but you taught your face to face class right now, as you’re considering what the future holds for you and your teaching. You’ve learned some things as you just said, What are you going to integrate? So think about a couple of things. How do you determine what you’re going to use? If you’re going to be on campus? Are you going to use a camera? Why would you use a camera? Well, are you going to do recordings, you’re not going to do recordings? Are you going to allow your students who might not be able to make it for whatever reason, the ability to into interface with you in the classroom, physically in the classroom? Yeah, I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no, all I’m saying is this now, a year ago, if we had this discussion, or a year and a half ago, if we had this discussion, Well, no. How would you do that? Why would you even think about something like that? Now, it’s a real discussion that you get to think about as a teacher, and as that instructor, get to feel. Feel it out and see what your students are interested in, but also see what you’re good at. If you’re not any good at recording, and posting recordings and stuff like that, maybe that’s not a tool for you to use.

Brent Warner
I think it’s going to be a really interesting conversation too, because students expectations are going to change quite a bit, right? And so we’ve been recording classes now for the last, you know, year, year and a half, whatever it is, right? And students are starting to get used to it. And they’re like, Wait, where’s my recording? You? Why don’t you know, why can’t I go back and look at this, which is actually interesting, too, because I don’t know, like, I was having this conversation with someone recently, which is, you know, you look at you, you have a recording of something, if you go to live, you go to a live and like, I almost never go back and watch the recording of it afterwards, almost never like, in most ever, yeah, in the low single digit percent of times that I might actually go and do that. But the feedback that I get from students seems to indicate that they are doing this more often, maybe maybe not a ton, but maybe in the high single percentage, you know, but even still, that could be two times or four times as much for you know, like, as was going on in the past, right. And so, I am really interested to see what students are going to be expecting. And if we have classes in on campus, they’re going to say, well, you’re Are you recording this class, so that I can go and watch it later? Right? You know, I was listening to you, but I wasn’t totally taking notes, I think, you know, like I was, you know, whatever else is going on, or I was I was distracted. And I want to hear what you had to say again, I want to focus more on that type of thing, right? And that is a technological possibility now, right, and, and becoming more recognized by students, and then what they can what they will get from some professors. And then it will become an impetus on the professors who don’t want to do that, to provide that in some other way, right? Because I just see this starting to become the trend and expectation. And then it’s like, well, why aren’t you doing this, you know, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe two years down the line, or three years down the line, or five years down the line.

Tim Van Norman
And think about it from the perspective of note taking, while you’re taking notes, you’re trying to pay attention, but you always miss something. Now you can go back through, watch the video, and pick up what you missed. And if you really care about your class, this is a really nice study tool. If you don’t care about your class, you’re not going to go back and it’s not going to matter anyway. But if for a student who’s care, who cares who’s really trying to get that good grade, who’s really pay attention, they now have the ability to go back. Now you as the instructor, have the ability to say last week I talked about this, if you want to see it, go back to the record. And you don’t have to go back through everything that you covered in that last week. So recording can be very useful. It. Like I said before, it might not be you. But that’s something to think about. There’s also a lot of our tool that can be useful in your classroom, you could actually use zoom. So you could if you’ve got a large classroom, you could have students with laptops, able to now see your screen better than if they they’re just looking at the screen that that you’re projecting because they can use zoom on their laptop, you could have it automatically transcribe. So they could actually see the text of what you’re saying. And maybe save that for note taking inside the classroom. I’m not talking about you know, somebody who’s not in the classroom, but somebody inside the classroom. And this could be useful for them. You’ve got Canvas, how is Canvas going to look for you? Are you going? How are you going to accept students submissions for assignments, that can be huge if you’re used to getting it paper all the time. And now you spent a year receiving everything online?

Brent Warner
Yeah, oh, this is what’s easier

Tim Van Norman
for you, you know, this is this can be different for different people.

Brent Warner
This is easier for you absolutely. Like to me. You know, I’ve been using online submissions for quite a long time now. But like, I would still see teachers walking around with their giant tote luggage and, you know, 20 books inside of their poll along with papers sprawling and a gust of wind goes, and it blows it all over the quality, you know, like, like, kind of the stereotypical joke image of the disheveled professor, but it’s like a very real thing, right? And so, I’m interested like, are people gonna go back to that they’re like, Oh, I can’t wait to get my hands on that Xerox machine and really, you know, smell that ozone, and print out 1000 copies of this document? Or are we gonna say, well, Hey, hold on a second. I can just walk with my my cell phone and I can log in with my fingerprint and we all have access to everything here in the classroom. Right? To me, that’s an obvious one choice. But I totally get that some people are like, No, I want that paper, I want that. I want that physical connection with goods and those types of things, too. And so I am really, really interested to see I my suspicion is that people will move a lot more towards online submissions, because students are going to want that too, right? They’re gonna say, Hey, I did all this work, why do I have to go pay $3 to go print this thing out in the library, and then bring it back to you to give it to you on paper? Right? Like, that doesn’t make sense to students, possibly in the future? And I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m just saying like, I’m we know, we’re talking about that long game. What are the changes that students now are going to start recognizing they’re capable of, and then that will become the expectation for teachers as well. And, Tim, you touched on this briefly. But I also want to go back to Canvas, right, the canvas structure for everything. You had a lot of teachers on campus that just never really used Canvas before. We went online, right? Like we had a few like, like, yeah, there were people out there about

Tim Van Norman
25% of our business, we’re not publishing Canvas before,

Brent Warner
that’s quite a few 25%. chunk, right? Like, to me,

Tim Van Norman
it is it is, but it’s also, it’s a strong 75% being published is a strong percentage, too. So I don’t want to I don’t want to minimize or weigh in on that. But there’s, there’s significant number of people who didn’t use Canvas, and now your students are, in many cases, and coming to me, as a support person asking, where’s my grade, I don’t see my grade in Canvas, right? Or, or about my teacher, I need to hand this in at 11 o’clock at night, or something like that. All of those things camp just makes Canvas allows us some of that freedom, right? And structure of Canvas. You know, how do you give the students that kind of resource and then copy it to the next semester? Unless you’re giving it in an electronic format? Like?

Brent Warner
Yeah, well, and also like you because of Canvas. And again, I know, I’m saying things that are fairly obvious, maybe maybe to many of our listeners, but like, okay, we’re going to structure our classes, we’re going to do weekly modules, or we’re going to do unit modules, or whatever it is, right. There are also teachers out there who up until the last year have done like, Hey, I’m gonna be printing all of this stuff out, and you’re gonna put it in your binder, and you’re gonna carry it around with you, right. And so that is a totally different thing. And I, you know, again, you don’t have to do one thing or the other this, this is just the challenge to think about, like, when you go back 1am i doing what I like, because I like those things, or because it serves the best purpose, right? There are going to be times where paper assignments are going to serve the best, best purpose for your class. Absolutely. And there are going to be times when a digital assignment that a student can turn in at, you know, well, I don’t like the midnight turn ends, because I don’t imagine many teachers are actually grading at midnight, but for me, let’s say, hey, you can turn it in at eight o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, right. And that’s when I’m going to start grading, I like that, because I’m not going to be on campus, and you know, like, and then that gives my students an extra two days to do their work and prepare themselves and do all those things, right. So we can look at these different options, and really kind of take the best of everything that we had before. And moving forward with it in order to best serve our students. You know, as we come back onto campus, or do some sort of hybrid version of those things.

Tim Van Norman
And in that, I love what you just said, take the best of what you’ve got, you know, now had an opportunity to learn something new. Take what you’ve learned, and what is best for you. Okay, not what’s best for Brent, not what’s best for him, what’s best for you, and put that together in a way that’s going to serve the students and serve you.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and with that in mind, I think we have a last idea here, which is check what your search students actually want, right? Like like run a survey with your students throw up a Google form or a Microsoft forms right in your class now this week, right or next week and throw it up and say you know, some some questions that are going to serve you well for when you make whatever shift you’re going to make or non shift you’re going to make in the future right? Do you like the online classes? Do you like them in person, right? A teacher individually can even start getting the the sense of their students because then they can make their decisions on what they’re going to request to in the future, even from their departments or whatever it is right? But also, hey, what kind of assignments Did you like? Did you do Did you like Working with Google, of course get assignments, right? Yes, no,

a little bit, you can arrange them, right? What time was the most convenient for you to turn in assignments? Right? All of these types of questions, I think, could be things that you could track down a little bit. And just see, because it’s based on the way that you run your class, but you can get a little bit of guidance on where you might want to lean it, and where what ideas you might want to step into more, and what you might want to step away from a bit. Yep. So lots of things to consider. We’ll keep talking about these things. I think we’re not done with the with the, with the transition back to class. We’re still online for now, but lots and lots to think about. So keep that in mind as we’re moving into the summer.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about annotating tools, and the future format of your class. For more information about the show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and listen to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
And as always, we want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link on that page where you can give us your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone and IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support at 949-451-5696 or by emailing IVCtech@ivc.edu. You have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim VanNorman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner. And we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality Have a good one, everybody.