3 June 2010Rich text in notes

22 May 2010Hand-drawn annotations: writing on the page

25 March 2010Displaying the differences between versions of a document

22 February 2010Integrating A.nnotate with Moodle for keeping notes on on-line course materials

3 September 2009New features for annotating images and working on PDFs

16 June 2009Sharing an A.nnotate note link on Twitter

9 December 2008 A.nnotate 3 released for on-line and standalone users

20 October 2008 Preview of version 3: images, shared folders, and more.

17 August 2008 Enterprise server version available for installation

4 August 2008 A.nnotate at the Edinburgh Repository Fringe

20 June 2008 A.nnotate and (online) word processors for document collaboration

12 June 2008What we're working on

1 June 2008Update supporting UTF-8, scanned documents, and multi-size PDFs

4 April 2008A.nnotate launched

2 April 2008About A.nnotate

Robert, 22 February 2010

Integrating A.nnotate with Moodle for keeping notes on on-line course materials

When we first started looking at Moodle two years ago, we thought the main benefit of integrating with A.nnotate would be for online grading so this was the first plugin we developed.

But since then, as universities put more of their course materials online, there has been a lot of interest in getting students to use A.nnotate instead of just staff. The idea is that it is all very well giving students the PDF of their course materials, but that isn't really any substitute for a printed copy they can go through in the lectures and put their own notes on as they work. So if you are to cut down on printed materials (and the corresponding financial and environmental costs) you have to give students a convenient way to work on the screen. And it should let them do as much as, and preferably more than, they could do on paper or they probably won't use it.

A moodle page showing the links for students to read and make notes
on course materials via a local A.nnotate server.

So this is our second plugin, currently undergoing large scale student trials. You need a local installation of the A.nnotate server and then you install the plugin in Moodle in the normal way. You put the address of your A.nnotate server in the configuration screen and there are a few other options depending which features you want switched on. When the plugin is active, Moodle pages that link to documents get an additional button next to each resource that takes them to the A.nnotate version.

Clicking the button takes the user to their own private A.nnotate view of that document. If necessary the document is transferred over to A.nnotate and processed, but this only happens the first time. There is only ever one copy of the doucument on A.nnotate however many students are viewing, but they each get independent views on it so they can keep their own notes.

You can have student accounts mirrored into A.nnotate so they are automatically logged in with their Moodle user name, and, of course, once they have access to the A.nnotate server they can use it for other purposes too, such as keeping notes on other documents or web snapshots they are using, or uploading assignments for marking.

If you'd like to try it out on our demonstration server or with a full local installation, we'd love to hear from you.