This blogpost was triggered by the announcement I received earlier this week of a number of webinar sessions on the use of Perusall.
Perusall is a collaborative annotation tool, in which students work together interactively. It helps students to prepare for class. They read and analyze texts/articles, ask questions, make comments and respond to each other. Teachers see all student annotations and can go deeper into them in class.
Like comparable software such as e.g Hypotes.is this type of technology aims to increase student engagement, expand reading comprehension and build critical-thinking and community in classes by making reading active, visible, and social, enabling students to engage with their texts, teachers, ideas, and each other in deeper, more meaningful ways.
IMO, this type of software is the more relevant in LSP and CLIL contexts where deeper processing of domain specific contents will contribute to thorough subject understanding and awareness of genre characteristics and so to the development of the related writing competence.
In this way it lends itself perfectly to support read/write pedagogies and blended and/or online teaching approaches by making students better prepared for the lessons and thus allowing better use of contact time with this preparation through discussions, tasks and exercises.
See the options for the upcoming webinars below: