ABSTRACT
The ability to pick up a pen or pencil and annotate a text is an important part of active reading. We teach students to use circles, stars, and other forms of markup to identify important features of a text. We also teach them how to interact with a text by writing in the margins while they read. Digital texts make this difficult. Most PDF readers support annotation, but not for every kind of PDF. Websites, social media, and research databases are even more difficult to annotate and often require printing. This chapter presents note-taking apps like Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote as one solution to this problem. With the right note-taking app, readers can clip any digital text, upload it to a cloud-based notebook, add searchable metadata tags, and annotate much as they would a print copy. The practice of clipping, tagging, and annotating is especially important as students’ coursework and research increasingly involves digital texts. The chapter begins with a description of digital notebooks and the process of clipping, tagging, and annotating. This is followed by a discussion of how the author teaches OneNote in a research-writing class. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how to assess students’ notebooks and resources for teachers who want to learn more about digital annotation.
