![]() ![]() Finally, I should say that my experience marking up and teaching a text from iAnnotate, was not exactly smooth. In addition, I made the PDF searchable in Adobe Acrobat before I uploaded it to Dropbox for use on the iPad. My students, for the most part, were using an inexpensive Dover edition of the book (one used a Kindle edition). I’m fortunate that the majority of the texts I regularly teach in upper-division courses are readily available in this way. ![]() First, I was using a google books PDF of the novel, a scan of the first edition, published in 1896. At the outset, I should say a couple things. The “then some” can be illustrated in my experience re-reading and marking up Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and then subsequently teaching the text in class directly from the iPad. Navigation (here by page, but also by bookmark, annotations, and search in iAnnotate) It was also easy, as it was for working with student writing, to mark up the texts in all the ways I do with material texts, and then some. With the iPad, though, I found it fairly easy to read lengthy stories and even short novels, though these texts were all ones with which I was very familiar (I have yet to do a first read of a teaching text on iPad). In fact, I have seldom read any literary text onscreen. While over the past few years, I have increasingly read critical articles online, often using markup tools in Mac’s Preview or in Adobe Acrobat on my laptop, until last fall, I had not read literary texts that I am teaching in electronic form. Marking up student writing, of course, is a natural teaching use for the iPad, but what I did not expect to be doing with iAnnotate, and which turned out to work pretty well, too, was using iAnnotate to read and mark up literary texts I was teaching, another spur of the moment decision. (I haven’t provided any sample images of student-paper markup here since I have not secured permission to do so, but the image to the right shows some annotation on a literary text, of which I say more below.) Finally, once I annotated a document, I could easily send students the marked-up copy via email. ![]() I think I will probably keep using iAnnotate for marking up student writing this semester, though I am not certain that I want to use it for longer writing assignments: we’ll see. I found my onscreen handwriting was not so great (no surprise there: it never has been terribly legible on paper, either), but it got better over time as I got the hang of it. You can even paste in commentary using the typewriting tool, something I found myself doing with a standard note on concision in summary writing: I saved text in the Notes app and modified it as needed for each individual paper before pasting it into the student’s document.Ī page of Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_ I ended up using both methods of commenting, reserving the latter for more lengthy commentary. I could easily underline or circle words and phrases or bracket sections of text (anything I ordinarily do on hard copies in pen or pencil) and add marginal commentary as needed, either by “writing” on screen with my finger or stylus or by using the typewriting tool, which allows you to type text. IAnnotate library screen, showing files synced DropboxĪt first, I intended to mainly use the iPad to mark up PDFs for my research, which has me reading a number of scanned turn-of-the-20th century novels, but I decided on the spur of the moment at the beginning of the semester to try marking up my graduate students’ annotated bibliographies and summary and response papers. ![]()
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