Hypothes.is* | Educational Technology Advisory Committee (ETAC) | Seneca Polytechnic

About

Hypothes.is is a pedagogical tool that enables students and teachers to have conversations in the margins of digital texts. Using social annotation gives you new ways to foster student success by building community, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of readings.

Here are some things to expect when using Hypothesis for social annotation in Blackboard.

Note: In order for PDFs to be annotable and accessible for students with screen reading devices, you will want to make sure that your PDFs are OCR-optimized.

Sometimes you may find yourself working with a PDF in which none of the text is selectable. This usually happens when a PDF is created from scanned images of text. You can use OCR technology to optimize these PDFs. There are a variety of other tools you can use, but you can use this free tool to OCR your PDFs: docdrop.

Read more about the accessibility of your PDFs: How to OCR PDFs.

License

* - Items with a college-wide license have an asterisk

Seneca has a license to hypothes.is which can be used in Blackboard.

Hypothesis Learning Resources

Select a learning path (or multiple learning paths) below to make sure you are comfortable using Hypothesis in your courses this term.

Step-by-step Guide for Using Hypothesis in Blackboard

Faculty Resources:

• How to create Hypothesis readings in Blackboard Ultra
• How to grade student annotations in Blackboard
• Using Hypothesis with Blackboard Course Files
• Using Blackboard Groups to create Hypothesis reading groups
• Exporting and Importing Annotations

Student Resources:

• A student guide to Hypothesis in the LMS
• Annotation tips for students
• An Illustrated Guide to Annotation Types
• Adding Links and Images to Your Annotations
• Adding Videos to Your Annotations

Keeping Student Information Safe When Using Online Tools

The Quick guide to secure handling of confidential student information for faculty using online learning tools (.PDF) (developed by the Teaching & Learning Centre and ITS) helps faculty choose secure online tools for teaching. The guide provides guidelines and examples to help faculty consider the information students might be giving up when using a new tool. It is intended for quick use of free or low-cost online tools and not for larger, more costly tools that require more rigorous data privacy vetting.

Examples

• Examples of Classroom Use - from the “in the wild” public version of Hypothesis but applicable to use within the LMS
• 10 Ways to Annotate with Students
• Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0
• Class Roster & the Social Annotation of Our Names - instructor assignment example (SUNY Finger Lakes CC - Curt Nehring Bliss)
• Collaborative Online Annotation with Hypothesis - introduction to Hypothesis module example (Missouri University of Science and Technology - M. Emilia Barbosa and Rachel Schneider)
• Teaching students to annotate - assignment teaching students to engage in collaborative annotation (Washburn University- Becky Dodge)
• Kalir, J., Morales, E., Fleerackers, A., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). “When I saw my peers annotating:” Student perceptions of social annotation for learning in multiple courses. Journal of Information and Learning Sciences
• Dartmouth’s Hypothesis Annotation Guide

Additional Resources

• How to create Hypothesis-enabled readings in Blackboard video tutorial
• Hypothesis Partner Workshop recordings
• Register for one (or more) of upcoming workshops
• Meet with the Hypothesis success team for a demo and chat about social annotation: Schedule some time with the Hypothesis success manager.

Contact us

The Teaching & Learning Centre
✉ teaching@senecapolytechnic.ca

Learn more
🔗 Hypothesis Help