Perusall is a tool that can make reading documents/watching videos/listening to podcasts more interactive and educational. You upload the material after which you and the students can post comments, ask questions and respond to fellow students.
With this tool, as a teacher, I can:
- Allow students to participate and respond anonymously;
- Easily track and respond to students’ thought processes and reasoning;
- Have Perusall measure the quality of annotations based on an algorithm they developed themselves;
- Gain detailed insight into student participation: the amount of comments posted, interaction with questions, and comments on peer annotations;
- Grade students on quality, quantity, submission timing and distribution of their annotations;
- Synchronize grades with Canvas.
How does Perusall work?
Need help with Perusall?
Why should I use this tool?
- Perusall generates overviews of student participation and the quality of annotations posted. These give you a good understanding of student participation, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
- To encourage students to engage in close reading and deeper understanding of the material, even prior to the lecture and with fellow students.
- To be able to identify ambiguities in the literature prior to the lecture. This can be the starting point of the meeting.
- Perusall allows you to transparently assess student annotations using criteria, which are also visible to students.
What is this tool less suitable for?
- Despite the fact that the tool makes interaction easy and encourages it, it is not a tool in which students actively collaborate with each other. Students learn from each other but each have their own self-study.
- It takes time to discover all the possibilities and settings of Perusall; the tool has many options which can make it less convenient to use with larger groups of students.
- For larger groups of students, you can also use a more compact tool such as FeedbackFruits Interactive Audio/Video/Document.
When does this tool work best?
- Perusall is a complex tool, therefore request support from the Perusall team for lecturers and students via info.perusall@uva.nl when using it for the first time.
- When you make an assignment in Perusall count for a small part, it stimulates students to contribute actively (experience of teachers of FNWI shows).
- It is important to carefully coordinate your expectations with students about posting comments. Consider clarity around the following questions:
- What exactly is the purpose of annotating this article?
- When will students respond to each other’s comments?
- How will you incorporate student input into your teaching?
