Easy Ways to Annotate and Share Notes on Webpages and PDFs
Last week I answered an email from a culinary arts teacher who wanted my suggestions for tools his students can use to annotate recipes that appear on webpages and PDFs. It actually sounded like a neat assignment because he wanted his students to add notes about what went well, what didn’t, and what they’d change about the recipe. My was to try using either the built-in annotation tools in Microsoft Edge or to try Kami.
Microsoft Edge and Kami are good tools for annotating webpages and or PDFs, but there are others worth considering if you are looking to do something similar to the assignment that the culinary arts teacher who emailed me last week gave to his students. Here are four options to try for annotating webpages and documents.
Annotate Webpages With Edge
Microsoft Edge has a bunch of neat features built into it including Immersive Reader and tools for annotation. To use these tools just click the pen icon in the upper-right corner of the Edge browser and you’ll see a menu of drawing and text tools appear. After adding your highlights and notes you can share them from the same menu where you found the drawing tools. Take a look at this short video to see how to use the annotation tools in Edge.
Annotate PDFs With Kami
Kami is a service that enables users to annotate and comment on PDFs. You can do this directly on the Kami website or in Google Drive with Kami’s Chrome extension. Kami also works with Word and Pages files. Here’s a little video overview of Kami.
Annotate Webpages With Seesaw
Seesaw has become a very popular digital portfolio tool because of the many things that you and your students can do with it. One of those things is to annotate webpages with Seesaw’s Chrome extension. With SeeSaw’s free Chrome extension installed students can save an entire webpage or select a portion of the page to save. Once they’ve made a selection of what to save the Chrome extension will automatically open SeeSaw in a new browser tab where students can then highlight, draw, and type on the saved page. Students can also record themselves talking about the pages they’ve clipped. Take a look at this video to see how it works.
Annotate in OneNote
OneNote has lots of useful features for students and teachers. One of the features is the ability to create a shared notebook in which students add notes to PDFs and Word documents. Upload a PDF to a page in a notebook and then use the drawing tools and text tools to add notes to it to share. Here’s a quick video overview of how to do that.
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