Comment History & The Feed
AP can do more than just insert comments into your favorite feedback and commenting solutions.
Users on a free trial, AP+ paid users, and institutional users can use AP’s Comment History feature to speed feedback and further engage students. Check out this video overview of how to use Comment Histories & The Feed:
AP can optionally save ALL the margin comments you create in Google Docs or Canvas SpeedGrader, automatically adding them to your AP Feed from which you can easily add them to one of your AP Comment Libraries. Imagine providing feedback to four or five assignments, capturing many of the topics on which you are investing the time to provide feedback, then harvesting those one-off comments to build out your AP Comment Libraries. Magic!
With History ON, any comment added to student work using AP’s Free Form text entry option will also be saved. In the screenshot below we see Microsoft Word and the big, friendly Free Form text entry area in the AP taskpane.
Close up of AP’s Free Form text area feature in Microsoft Word
Supercharge Canvas SpeedGrader
AP’s Comment History goes one step further in Canvas SpeedGrader: optionally save Comments along with the course, assignment, and student associated with the feedback. Why do this? You’ll get analytics at the course and assignment level AND a history of all your feedback (across multiple assignments and even courses, potentially) for each of your students. Fantastic for student conferences or remembering whether or not you provided feedback on a specific issue on an earlier draft.
At any point, visit your Comment Feed to select the Comments you’d like to promote to become reusable. Just add them to a Library and Group – editing them to make sure they’re appropriate and generalized.
Adding AP Comments through Google and Canvas SpeedGrader
In Google Docs, with Comment Histories on, just type into a comment bubble and AP will save the text to your Feed.
In Canvas SpeedGrader just type into a comment bubble, rubric comment, or overall comment and AP will save the text to your Feed.
Just comment in SpeedGrader as you always would…and AP will save your text!
Free Form Comments
Microsoft Word:
In Microsoft Word, AP+ or institutional users can turn on a nice big text entry area. Simply highlight text in the Word document, type your comment into the Free Form text entry area, click Insert and your text appears in the document AND is saved to your Feed.
Google Chrome:
In AP’s Chrome Extension, Free Form commenting can be turned on so a text entry box appears in the pop-up and the AP toolbar (see screenshot below). In Google Docs, or other supported platforms, highlight text and then type your comment into the Free Form box, then click Insert. Along with having a bigger area in which to type and edit, you’ll also automatically save your new comment to your Feed.
Note: in the AP Chrome Extension the text entry box is plain text, since many commenting solutions do not yet support text formatting in margin comments.
The Free Form text entry area in AP for Chrome