Introduction to Perusall – Workshop Recording

The above is a recording of the social annotation tools workshop, which focused on a Perusall, a platform that allows for in-line, threaded commentary on and discussions of texts.

Formatted as a VoiceThread, the recording includes two “slides,” which you can toggle between using the arrows on the lower right. (Here is a direct link to the VT recording, if you’d prefer that.)

The first slide is a general overview of social annotation tools that offers a brief demo of a built-out Perusall page, and a few ideas about how Perusall might be used.

The second slide presents a basic but wide-ranging how-to that walks through set up via Moodle, adding texts to the library, annotating them, and creating Perusall assignments.

This workshop recording is a good starting place for anyone thinking about using Perusall. One further consideration for instructors: Perusall includes analytics-based automatic grading that tracks things like comment quality, the time a student spends on a document, and when they opened it. Instructors can completely and safely ignore this feature. These automatic grades (and the analytics from which they’re derived) will not be visible to students unless you choose to release them. The platform is fully FERPA compliant, and the analytics data is not used for anything beyond the Perusall platform.