Audience: Franklin University students.
Disclaimer: The results and functionality of the following article may not be possible if you are not part of the intended audience.
Perusall for Students
Topics
- What is Perusall?
- What is Annotating?
- Launching Your Perusall Assignments
- Creating Annotations
- What is Meant by a Thoughtful Annotation?
- Interacting with Classmates
- How to Score Well on Perusall Assignments
- Perusall How-To Guides
- Accessibility in Perusall
What is Perusall?
Perusall is a free social annotation platform. It helps you master course materials faster, understand the material better, and get more out of your classes. In your Perusall assignments, you'll collaboratively annotate course materials (videos and articles) with others in your class. You'll receive rapid answers to your questions and help others resolve their questions (which also helps you learn).
What is Annotating?
To annotate is to engage with your learning materials by pausing to think, question, and reflect. When you annotate, you read or watch actively, not passively. This helps you in the following ways:
- You'll find you don't need to endlessly keep re-reading or re-watching materials.
- You'll track and improve your comprehension. When you start to lose the thread of understanding, you'll recognize it and take steps to fix it.
- You'll find it much easier to remember what you’ve read.
- You'll create a visible record of the thinking you do while you work to make sense of the material. This helps you and your professor know what you understand and where you need help.
Annotating takes time, but it saves you time in the long run. It makes you a more efficient consumer of information and concepts.
Launching Your Perusall Assignments
1. Click on the assignment in Canvas.
2. Access the Perusall platform by clicking the link below the assignment. This will open Perusall in a new window:
3. Click on the assignment you wish to work on (1), then click Work on Assignment (2):
⚠️ Important! Make sure you launch each Perusall assignment from the corresponding assignment-specific link in Canvas. Do not go directly to the Perusall website to do your assignments.
Creating Annotations
- For an assignment based on text, drag and highlight the part of the text you want to annotate. Once you finish highlighting, the right-side panel will open and you can type your annotation.
- For an assignment based on a video, play the video. When you get to a spot you want to annotate, click the Add Comment button. A panel will open on the right where you can type your annotation. Press Enter to submit the comment; your classmates will see it appear in real time.
What is Meant by a Thoughtful Annotation?
Thoughtful annotations deeply engage points in the readings, stimulate discussion, offer informative questions or comments, and help others by addressing their questions or confusions. For each assignment, you'll be evaluated on the overall body of your annotations. You'll receive a score for each assignment as follows:
- Excellent: Demonstrates exceptionally thoughtful and thorough reading of the entire assignment.
- Proficient: Demonstrates thoughtful and thorough reading of the entire assignment.
- Needs Improvement: Demonstrates superficial reading of the entire assignment OR thoughtful reading of only part of the assignment.
- Unacceptable: Demonstrates superficial reading of only part of the assignment.
Interacting with Classmates
- For an assignment based on a video, your classmates' comments appear as dots on the timeline at the bottom of the video. Yellow dots indicate comments or questions by you or other students; blue dots indicate comments from your instructor. To add to a conversation started by one of your classmates, click on their dot in the timeline to open up the conversation panel, type your comment, and then press Enter.
- For an assignment based on text, you'll see highlights superimposed on the document that represent comments that you and other students have entered. Yellow highlights indicate comments or questions by you or other students; blue highlights indicate comments from your instructor. To add to a conversation started by one of your classmates, click on their highlight in the text to open up the conversation panel, type your comment, and then press Enter.
- You can “mention” a classmate in a comment or question to have them notified by email (they’ll also see a notification immediately if online), and you’ll also be notified when your classmates respond to your questions.
How to Score Well on Perusall Assignments
- Start the assignment early in the module.
- Return to the assignment several times during the module to keep engaging in conversations with your classmates.
- View or read all the way to the end.
- Make connections with the material. Relate it to your textbook, to other reading or videos, to your personal experiences, or to things you've learned in other classes.
- Agree or disagree with the author/speaker or your classmates and explain why.
- Write comments and questions that stimulate discussion and elicit responses from your classmates. You can mention a classmate by using the @ symbol.
- Help your classmates by answering their questions or addressing their confusions.
- Don't annotate just one section of the material. Spread your annotations throughout.
- You are encouraged to write more than the minimum number of annotations. Perusall will count your best annotations in determining your score. For example, if you are required to write four annotations and you write seven, Perusall will count your four highest-scoring annotations for your grade.
View scoring examples for more information. You'll see what good, average, and poor annotations look like.
Perusall How-To Guides
- Getting Started - Since Perusall is integrated in the learning management system (Canvas) and uses open educational resources, you can skip the sections about enrolling and purchasing.
- Assignments
- Accessing and Navigating Course Materials
- Writing Good Comments
Accessibility in Perusall
Perusall has several features that can be used to increase the accessibility of materials and assignments:
For Texts
- Course materials can be read aloud from within Perusall without having to use specialized screen reader software
- Text size and color contrast can be changed
- Open Dyslexic Font for reading is supported
For Videos and Podcasts
- Perusall will show captions on YouTube videos when available. YouTube only provides captions to Perusall when they are uploaded by the video author (i.e., YouTube's automatically-generated captions won't show up in the Perusall player).
- To access the original YouTube video and any associated transcript or additional captions that aren't accessible within Perusall, click "View original web page" in the Perusall Library entry for that video.
- If captions are not available in a video-based assignment, it is recommended that you use Live Caption in Chrome.
For more information, Read Accessibility and Inclusive Learning Options on Perusall and visit Perusall's Accessibility page.