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Antext - getting to the bottom of the text
An Antext is an annotated text that allows students, teachers, and others to easily highlight and annotate a text - those annotations can then be commented on (replied to) themselves. The newest Antext is Chekhov's "The Kiss." The best way to see what Antexts are all about - is to go look at (and annotate) one. I have set up two Antexts - the first is from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1, the second is from the first chapter of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Feel free to explore, annotate, and give me some feedback - I know how excited I am and I want to share some of that with you. If anyone has an idea for a text they'd like to see up here - let me know. If you are experiencing problems and are using Internet Explorer - please try Firefox or another browser.
My students are finishing a lively discussion on EB White's "The Door". I would love to use it as an antext where students from other schools could participate! There are so many short stories and poems for discussion and so little time that the antext seems to be one route to follow especially in the midst of the H1N1 pandemic!
this seems like a good idea for teachers and students too
Actually it is good to have software for remote people who can not or maybe hard to reach school and university. Software like this would be great for some people in the remote area. Great work for whoever have idea
I suggested this to the group, Teachers without Borders - but I haven't heard back from them at all.
Two texts immediately jumped into my mind when I discovered your Antexts. I think they'd be great examples to annotate for different reasons. One is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which we not only have an unreliable narrator, but dialogue and language enriched by individual agendas. The widow, with her religious ideas, does not talk like Huck in his innocence, nor like Pap with his drunken bigotry, and certainly not like the Duke and King when they are at their most devious. Among other things, this book is a great one for helping students learn what kinds of things someone reveals--or conceals--when he or she speaks.
Another book that would lend itself well to annotation is The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. The first chapter alone is a masterpiece of text that shows clearcut characters remaining individuals within a group; it characterizes people using their objects (physical and otherwise); and its flow of words is unforgettable. I recommend it.
I think annotating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is great - and I would start with just dialogue at first. Students often find the dialogue confusing, with dialects they aren't familiar with, and every character seeming to speak a different way. Besides, not only does Twain's dialogue in this book move things along, but the characterization by dialogue is nothing short of amazing. The religious fanatic, the bigot, the feuder, the con man, the slave--each has his or her own language. Rich fodder for annotation.
(Then we can move onto the narration.)
Great suggestions - Huck is so big - but I think I would start with the first chapter (a good place to start). O'Brien's book would be a bit problematic because it is still in copyright, but I could do an excerpt like I did with Song of Solomon.
I love the way this idea moves annotation onto the computer screen. For years, I have been having students do "Double-entry" journals on passages and have found that students find writing these shorter entries less daunting than a more formal response. I am really curious to see how this tried-and-true assignment will transfer to the computer.
Forgive me if this is a dense question...does the rest of the article describe how you did this? I'm very interested in using the idea, but I'm not sure how you were able to create the text and the annotation fields. I'm using another web service for this kind of activity, but your Song of Solomon example was much easier to access than anything I've done.
If you go to www.co-ment.com you can see the annotation service - it is very easy and very straightforward. What we've done here is to wrap the annotated text with references and buttons to access those references - if you'd like I could put a short text up here for you and/or your class to use. They would have to register, but it would be here, or you can create your own at co-ment.
Joe Scotese
At my school we have an online program called "moodle" (it's really similar) to blackboard. I see that you successfully linked the annotated texts to your own website. Since reading yours, I have begun to make my own annotated texts on co-ment.com and I want to link up mine to my moodle page, but it seems as though I need to upload my students' email addresses in order to permit them to access the page. Is that accurate? Did you do that for your site? That seems like an inCREDIBLE amount of work (and patience) and some of my students do not have email addresses (I know it's weird). Let me know if there's an easier way. I know you're busy and you might not have a lot of time to answer, but I just love this idea and I have been making CRAZY photocopies in the past and I find the e-annotations to be equally as compelling. Thank you for this site, it's brilliant!
In order to embed a co-ment text it needs to be public. That means I've been playing with fire - because anyone could comment on the text - but so far I've been lucky. Co-ment tells me they are working on a semiprivate mode that should be perfect - accessed by a password. I hope that helps. I don't have students register - I just treat the whole thing as public.
Have you used this in lieu of (in addition to) face-to-face conferences concerning student writing? It would be interesting to try out submitting a student essay for comment--sort of an on-line writer's workshop. I'd love to hear your ideas/concerns about this.
Google docs is a good option for this type of activity with student writing. It's very simple to use, allows for group editing, has highlighting options, etc.
I will have to investigate it more - it's been quite a while. There are a couple of things I like about Co-Ment - one is the frames that I can create around the document with reference materials - the other is how easy it is to annotate things and then reply to those annotations.
I have not used it with student writing. I think more that with individual students - I could see putting up model essays (good and bad) for students to comment and conference on. I think this makes more sense - only because of the privacy issues.
I would love to be able to participate in this wonderful exercise, but the Antext for Song of Solomon still won't work for me. I am currently in Mozilla Firefox and it's not showing up for me. Has anybody else had this problem? If so, how did you fix it?
I have not heard of anyone else having that problem using Firefox (or any browser other than Internet Explorer). Try going directly to the co-ment site and see what happens. Click here to go directly to the Song of Solomon excerpt.
This is an exciting idea. My school has a predominance of lower socio-ecomonic students so that our classroom sets of books only go so far and most of my students are not going to buy the text for themselves. I have needed a way to teach them how to annotate as well as encourage them to annotate without resorting to Xerox copies. This might be the answer, and I can hardly wait to try it out.
Now if I could only get a classroom set of laptops, we would be set.
Dianna
Have you checked out the website www.donorschoose.org ? It might be a way to get those laptops. From the projects I have looked at there, it often seems that when you have a clear, specific reason for what you're asking for (such as doing the text annotations) donors donate. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is one of the frequent donors. Only classroom teachers are elibible to post requests.
I think that this will be very useful because then students wont have to buy the books they can just annotate online and teachers wont have to check books to see what the student has taken notes on. Not only will it be useful to the student and teacher but to the student community because they can all help one another with their comments and questions which will benefit their reading and their time in the classroom because all students will come in with a better understanding of what they read saving time and allowing for more progress to be made.