Asking students to collaboratively annotate a course text (a reading, a sample essay, a model text, etc.) is one way to gauge students' understand of the text and encourage students to interact with each other to better understand the text. There are many ways to approach a collaborative annotation assignment.

The most straightforward way to create a collaborative annotation is simply to use Google Docs. Copy the text into a Google doc and share it with students. Check the privacy settings to make sure anyone at UCI with the link can edit the document; that will allow students to leave notes on the text.

You can give students specific guidelines for annotation. For example: asking them to find particular writing techniques or potential examples for an essay, instructing them to look up words or references they don't understand, or directing them to ask a certain number of questions and answer a certain number of their peers' questions). Or you can add annotations in the text, asking questions or asking for student reactions, and have them answer those questions.

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If you're interesting in trying a new platform, Perusall is a website that allows many advanced features for collaborative annotation. Persuall is a free website that allows you to upload your own readings (or choose readings from online) and collaboratively annotate them as a class. You can annotate with your own comments and ask questions for students to answer. Additionally, students can leave questions and comments of their own for you to respond to. Persuall also incentivizes annotation by giving students feedback on their depth and breadth of annotation.

Link to Perusall: https://perusall.com/

Perusall is free for you and for students, but does not integrate directly with Canvas. Perusall is used in many Academic English classes, so your students may already have experience with it.

Here's a brief tutorial video showing some of the features of Perusall: