I use iAnnotate for electronic grading, and in this video I want to give you
just a quick tutorial for how you can use iAnnotate effectively. I'm not going
to cover every last detail, but just a few highlights. On the screen you'll see
that I have a file in my library and I've just clicked on it to open it, and
the first thing to note is that to get back to where we just where we click in
the top left ... corner, as you can see. And if we click on
this orange area itself we can actually save the file as well. So that gives us a
few options. Now looking on the right side here we have an option to have a
look at the thumbnails, so if we want to see the different pages this could be
very helpful for a larger document. And then we have a toolbar on the right side
here. Now we actually have a couple of toolbars, and if you look at the bottom
right corner you can see that by clicking on that we can access the other
toolbar. We're just going to stick with number one here, but we have more tools
available. If you want to change the toolbar, you go to the toolbox at the
very top, you click on it, and now you can change what is on your toolbar by
dragging and dropping things. So let's say that I go to "all tools" -- we have lots
and lots of tools here -- and I'm going to take "photo." I would click on it -- well, just
hold my finger down, drag it over, and drop it. It didn't want to stay there, but
let's give that a try. There it is! Getting rid of things is a little harder
actually. You have to really hold the thing down and then you can move it out
of there. There it is. It's gone. You can also click on the "plus" at the top,
and that allows you to do a whole bunch of things like create your own custom
toolbar, but we won't go into that at this point. Let's go through some of my
favorite tools next, and these are the main ones I use. So you can really create
quite a simple toolbar here. The first one is the pencil, and you can write with
that. If you have a stylus you can use it. You can even write with
your fingers. Often you have to zoom in, and I would recommend that if
you're going to do a lot of electronic grading you get the biggest iPad you can
because that makes it a lot easier. You don't have to zoom in and zoom out quite
so much. So if you want to write something, you can write, you know, "good ...
check mark" -- whatever you like. You can undo it if you want (any part of it), so
that's very easy. You can also change the color. I'm just going to put this back here,
but you can change the color. So I have blue right now. If you're feeling very
friendly towards your students you can use green or something. You can use red
if you're a very strict marker. Actually I do use a lot of red so maybe that
tells you something -- I don't know. And once you're done with it you can click
on it, checkmark it. And there is our comment. Now if we click on it again
we have a couple of options. We can actually move it very easily. So we'll
move it here. I'm just going to move it to wherever we want it to be. And we can
also turn it into a stamp, which is really cool. So if we want to turn us
into a stamp then we would give it a title. Now the critical thing for
creating stamps is that you put a zero in front of whatever title you're
going to give it. And so you could say, you know, "zero" and I'm going to call this "good"
let's say. Here we are. Let's click on "check" and there's our stamp. Now we don't
see it yet, but if we zoom out here and we click on our stamp function now, which
is further down ... now if we want to leave a stamp we click anywhere on the
page. And there is our previous or last stamp. Now this is maybe not the one that
we want, so let's just get rid of this here ... oops! ... there we go. [I] went to the wrong
place there. But here's all of our stamps and you can see that "good" shows up.
The reason we put that zero again is that your stamps that you create this
way they don't get mixed up with all the preset stamps, because this menu
goes on forever, and you're not likely to use them [the presets]
anyway. So just keep your own stamps at the very top. As you can see you can
create longer stamps as well, and I find this very effective because if there's
something that you often mention, then you can just put a stamp, and it's very
easy to deal with. We'll just delete this for a second here, but that is definitely
an option. Okay, we've covered a couple of tools now -- the pencil
and the stamp function. There's also the typewriter and you may not think that
you want to type, maybe you just want to use a pencil, but you can combine this
with audio very effectively. So we have audio on our typing pad here, and if it's
enabled you can just leave a comment and it will type it out. Let's give that
a try: "I really love this title, exclamation mark." ... Alright, well it
normally works but in this case because I'm trying to record this on my computer
screen it's taking up too much memory. You'll just have to take my word for it!
This is a great option. The next one here has to do with email, and I've
mentioned this in the previous video -- if you've got this email tool added and you
set it up properly, then you can have a whole preset email message that's all
ready for you to go. Then you can change the title a little bit and just
add the email address of the recipient, and then you're good to go.
So that can be very effective. The last one that I want to mention is the
sound clip. Here's the sound clip and last time it didn't work so well with a
typewriter but let's give this another try. We're going to add a sound clip,
and let's just click anywhere. And now we can record our voice. It should be recording
our voice at this point. And then we can play it back in a moment. Now let's see
if this worked ... You can hear that it did work so that time it wasn't a
problem. Those are some of the
best options out there, and the audio I think is the best part of all because
instead of having to write copious amounts of comments and get a really
sore wrist at the end writing those final comments, you can just leave an
audio comment and you have a chance to really say what's on your mind, to go
into more depth about your your opinion and your perspective. And I think
students definitely appreciate that. I tend to leave the final comment at the
very top here, so it's actually the first thing that a student would see and then
I would often put a box around it as well, so if I just go like that
then the student is going to know that that icon is there, because sometimes the
icons don't show up when you don't open the document properly. At least
then the student knows "Oh, there should be an icon there, or there's something
missing when I've downloaded this incorrectly." Another thing you can do is if
you have multiple icons you can number them -- one, two, three, and so on.
Just so the student has a clear idea of what the order is.
I wouldn't go much beyond seven or eight audio comments. Each one is about a
minute maximum anyway, but if you have too many then the file
size can get a little bit large. Okay, so hopefully that gives you a sense of
what's all available in iAnnotate. I think it's a fantastic resource and can
make your grading much smoother and much more in-depth, which i think is
definitely appreciated.