As we wrap up 2024, we’re grateful for another year of partnership with educators around the world who share our mission of building connections with learners through the power of feedback. We appreciate your feedback and are looking forward to improving our solutions, Annotate PRO (AP) and Canopy, in 2025. To help with this, we’re ending the year with the launch of an 11trees’ Reddit, where you can post questions, ideas, and connect with our team and like-minded educators to help shape the development of our solutions.
In the first half of 2024, we released the Canopy Discussion Map for Canvas LMS, to help educators visualize online conversations and better interact with students. We also invested in AP’s underlying tech to meet Google’s ever-improving security requirements for Chrome Extensions. Later in 2024, we released a series of improvements to AP, including the magical ability to format plain text with bold, italics, and bullets, improved Checklists to supercharge feedback, new and improved AP Comment Libraries, better support for BrightSpace LMS, and expanded Comment Library sharing for institutional clients.
The Canopy Discussion Map gives instructors an interactive, zoomable, draggable view into posts and replies in Canvas LMS.
In 2025 we will improve AP’s editing and import/export experience, increase the number of EDU platforms AP supports, add K12 (primary and secondary) AP Comment Libraries, continue to improve Checklists, and launch Canopy’s Feedback Machine for Canvas LMS.
AP’s core value is its ability to provide a consistent comment bank experience across Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Canvas, Blackboard – anywhere educators create text feedback for students. The majority of our users, however, are on Canvas LMS – which is used by approximately 50% of institutions worldwide. If you teach with Canvas we wonder if you’ve ever received feedback through the platform, as a student does. The experience is not a good one from our POV. Students must click multiple times, piece together rubric feedback, document comments, and overall comments to create a coherent sense of their growth opportunities. Or they can skip all that effort and check only their grade, defeating the purpose of great feedback. Feedback Machine, our goofy code name for a new solution, will change this dynamic.
Feedback Machine unifies the assignment prompt, document feedback/markup, comments, overall comments, rubric scores, and grade into a coherent experience for students that is, at max, two clicks from any location in Canvas. Equally as important, Feedback Machine allows instructors to create a gradebook item to incentivize students’ interaction with the feedback created for them. To learn more, and sign up for a spring 2025 sandbox to experiment with Feedback Machine, click here.
 Finally, in 2025 we will introduce more automation capabilities for AP. You may think of AP as only a comment bank solution but really it is an automation tool. With one click you can add a clearly written paragraph to a document or translate comments or freeform text into 80+ languages. AP can click to submit a comment, in Google Docs and Canvas Speedgrader, saving you time. But what if AP further automate repetitive processes for teachers? For instance, perhaps the system your institution uses for final grades requires three clicks and a dropdown selection per student. After you’ve entered a grade, AP could automate those clicks and selections, saving you time by taking you directly to the next grade input. AP will provide automation libraries for major platforms like Canvas and Brightspace just as it provides expert Comment Banks currently. We look forward to your thoughts in this space, as we explore, and will especially appreciate concrete examples of repetitive processes you’d like to simplify.Â
In case you missed our 2024 updates:
AP: Major Platform ImprovementsÂ
Annotate PRO moved to version 7, bringing substantial updates to our core infrastructure, and improving speed and security while enhancing integration across platforms. We’ve significantly improved AP’s performance with Canvas, Brightspace, and Blackboard LMS, making your feedback workflow smoother than ever. These updates ensure AP functions seamlessly while working across multiple platforms.Â
Some of the updates to AP were more visible and included support for using AP in more places than ever before. 2024 saw added support for all major AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, CoPilot, and more) as well as improved support for BrightSpace and Schoology.
AP: Format Text AnywhereÂ
One of our most requested features is now a reality: AP+ and institutional users can now add formatted text – including bold, italics, underlining, and bullet points – in plain text environments like Canvas SpeedGrader comment bubbles. This means you can emphasize key points, properly format citations, and create more structured feedback, even in platforms that don’t natively support text formatting. Combined with our improved Free Form editor and keyboard shortcuts, you can now create rich, formatted feedback without your fingers leaving the keyboard.
AP: Improved Checklists
Our Checklist feature has transformed how educators provide detailed, consistent feedback. Whether you’re marking MLA formatting, evaluating presentation skills, or providing constructive criticism, Checklists make it easy to combine multiple feedback elements into a single, coherent response. The latest updates allow you to optionally include unchecked items. Soon, you’ll be able to keep checklists open for repeated use – perfect for grading multiple submissions with similar feedback needs.
Collaboration
Institutional users can now share Comment Libraries with greater flexibility. Whether you’re distributing institution-wide writing guidelines, sharing department-specific feedback libraries, or collaborating with a small group of colleagues, our new sharing features make it simple to manage and maintain shared content. AP’s institutional offering now supports both broad distribution to all users and targeted sharing with specific colleagues.
AP: New and Improved Libraries
Speaking of shared Libraries, we made some improvements to our most popular Library – College Edition. The third edition adds new comments for addressing student AI use and makes good use of new AP features like text formatting and checklists. We also released a new Library, AI Prompt Edition, that helps coach educators make efficient use of AI tools and provide a starter set of prompts for using these tools as a way to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
11trees Blog
The 11trees blog was more active than in 2024 than in past years. We did deep dives on topics like Real and Substantive Interaction and the importance of teaching students how to use Grammar Checking Tools. We also announced several live webinars that we ran during the year to interact with our users and show some of the new features we’ve just mentioned. To all of you who took the time to join us in webinars this year, thank you!