Social annotation tools allow instructors to post a reading to a website and then have students tag it with comments. These provide many benefits for students and instructors. One, they can demonstrate to the instructor that students are reading an article, especially if the instructor requires each student to make one or more postings. Two, they can demonstrate where students struggle in understanding articles. Three, students can use them to better comprehend articles by asking questions and getting responses from their peers. Four, they better connect discussion to an article than a separate learning management system discussion forum. This can be particularly helpful in classes that require students to do close readings of texts, such as in a Shakespeare class when analyzing a particular play or in a graduate class when dissecting an academic article.
