Managing The Quantity of Student Annotations
Managing Student Work By Building Digital Citizenship
As students solve problems in CueThinkEF+, how do you manage the large amount of student work?
Look at a few thinklets in depth for each assignment and leave an annotation on something the student did well and something for them to think about. Keep a checklist of which students’ work you viewed to help you do a deep dive for each student over time.
Then, have your class look at the rest by annotating each other’s work to learn from their peers while building digital citizenship skills. This ensures everyone’s thinking is heard and conveys to students everyone’s voice is valued.
CueThink supports for annotations
2 features supports students with digital citizenship to give them the practice they need.
Embedded sentence starters
Students can access sentence starters when giving feedback on peers’ thinklets. Coupling this feature with the CueThink Annotation poster deepens students’ feedback over time.
Fig. 1: When creating an annotation, select the 3 purple dots to access sentence starters.
Flagging annotations
The flagging feature automatically hides an annotation and sends the teacher a notification to review the content.
Annotation Routines
Here are some tried and true routines teachers have shared with us.
Annotate 3 thinklets
Students don’t need to annotate every peers’ thinklet for each problem to reap the benefits of peer-to-peer learning. Task students to annotate:
1 thinklet that used a different strategy than they did
1 thinklet with 0 comments
1 thinklet of their choice
Annotation Buddies
Partner students up to view and annotate each other’s thinklets. Change annotation buddies every few problems.
Share exemplar annotations from time to time
Students may need reminders on what quality annotations look and sound like from time to time, especially after a school vacation. Select 2-3 exemplars to highlight in a brief class discussion or mini-lesson on why they are exemplars.
These routines develop students’ digital citizenship while helping you manage student work. It’s a win-win.