Annotate PRO is free and comes with ten Comments (focused on college/high school argumentative writing) that you can quickly change to suit your needs.

User can purchase additional libraries that we created and maintain: College Edition, Legal Writing Edition, and others to come.

Most powerfully, schools can design their own libraries that we can automatically provide to their teachers and students.

By simply creating an Annotate PRO account at a site license institution, new users will automatically get the library or libraries intended.

So high schools could develop a library specific to their curriculum, using our College Edition as a starting point, then automate sharing of that library to all teachers.

The following year the school district might add a library intended for middle school teachers, scaffolding feedback and aligning with the high school curricula and Annotate PRO library.

Another school might develop a library specific to peer review or English Language Learners (providing dual language responses, for instance).

A university might create a library intended for peer tutors and TAs, to speed training and improve consistency amongst many graders.

Schools can author their libraries using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets using our content as a starting point. We review the library, then upload to our servers and do some behind the scenes work – all within a couple of days. Then BOOM! Potentially hundreds of teachers (and students?) can be using the library to create better feedback more quickly.

Just Contact Us to learn more!

We regularly build customized versions of Annotate for First Year Writing programs, high school English departments, Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives and similar. Customizations can be simple, for instance replacing the references to a writing handbook or Purdue’s OWL website with a specific resource, or more detailed. Please use the Contact Us link in the menu to find out more.

This is not currently possible, but it is something we can implement in the future.

We are depending on the powerful Search feature to making ordering of a Comment Library almost unnecessary. Feedback welcome!

Adding links is a fantastic way to follow the “bite, snack, meal” approach to user experience design.

In the Comment, give the user a concise overview of the issue or compliment (bite). Then give them a link to more detail – that they need to want to pursue (snack). And then, perhaps, in the webpage you provide, give the user additional options to learn: videos, exercises etc. (meal).

So how do you add them?

Just type them in. Like: www.yourgreatlink.com.

The links won’t yet be clickable in Microsoft Word, but they’ll be highly visible. Receivers of feedback can right-click on a Comment to copy and open in their browser.

Our stacked list of priorities includes adding ‘wysiwyg’ editing to Annotate, which would mean boldface, italics, and links.

Let us know how valuable this will be to you!

What does it mean if you fire up Annotate PRO in Microsoft Word 2016 and see the message at the right?

Annotate PRO, like many modern web apps, stores data locally – for speed of access and to power features.

Some browsers may have the ability to store data locally turned off. Annotate PRO will detect this situation and flag you…

What data are we storing? Your user ID, the Comment Library you’re using, and similar data. No passwords or personal info.

To use Annotate you’ll have to give your browser permission to store data locally. So far, we only know of this issue affecting Windows users, so the following instructions are specific to Internet Explorer 11.

Here’s how:

1. Open Internet Explorer 11.
   1. “What,” you exclaim? I don’t use that browser!!! Oh, but you do – Microsoft Word 2016 uses it to present Add-ins like Annotate PRO, Wikipedia, and any other app running inside Office.
2. Go to Settings and then Internet options.
   1. 
3. Click on the Advanced tab and scroll all the way to the bottom of the resulting list.
4. Find Enable DOM Storage (it’s 10 or 15 items from the bottom) and make sure it is checked.
   1. 
5. Click OK and go back to Microsoft Word.
6. Close the Annotate PRO taskpane by clicking the ‘x’ in the top right corner (same row as Annotate PRO) in the screenshot showing the original message above).
7. Reopen Annotate PRO. The message should be gone and you should be able to proceed.

If you’re still blocked from using Annotate PRO please make sure both Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Word 2016 are updated to their latest versions (which you may or may not be able to do, given institutional policies and controls), then contact us for help. We’ll jump on a screenshare and sort it out.

Peer review is one the greatest under-used pedagogical strategies.

But student writers, no matter their level, often struggle with providing coherent, constructive feedback.

Annotate PRO can dramatically improve students’ responses to each other, and their assessment of their own work, by providing them with the language of response.

They can highlight some text in their own or a fellow student’s work, then search a Comment Library for an appropriate response.

We can work with your institution to design a Comment Library specifically for peer review, so that the observations (the text the student chooses) is written at the appropriate level and includes questions to help the student dig further into the particular issue.

For instance, a Comment concerning argument might begin:

• Your writing could be stronger here – I don’t think you really believe what you’re saying.

The peer reviewer would select the above text, but then be prompted to continue, making suggestions to help the student writer state their opinions more vehemently along with ideas to improve the logic of the underlying argument.

At the very least, having access to the Comment Libraries used by their faculty will further demystify writing and help them understand more deeply what good writing looks and feels like.

Soon!

Like, summer 2017 – just in time for the new academic year.

Microsoft, to their great credit, have made their cool new Apps for Office solution work on Office for iPad, too.

So if you’ve got Microsoft Word on your iPad you’ll be able to use Annotate PRO there – same library, same full-text search.

The latest version of Annotate PRO works on Microsoft Word 2016 – including Windows and Mac. You can also use Annotate PRO with Word 2016 online.

iPad is coming soon!

Yes!

You can install from here. Or get your school’s Google Suite administrator to add Annotate PRO to all teacher accounts with just a couple of clicks…

We can add your institution’s email domain (like YourISD.edu) to our database and every user will automatically get a specific Comment Library or Libraries.

Automation is so cool!

No.

You can try to use Word Online on your tablet, but your experience will vary with the version of Android, power of your tablet etc. We don’t anticipate it will be a great experience.

And we aren’t aware of any plans on the part of Microsoft to bring Office to Android tablets.

Google, for its part (as the creators of Android) have been working for years to bring ChromeOS and Android together.

ChromeOS is based on the Chrome browser and is the operating system behind millions of Chromebooks. Chromebooks, by very definition, will never run Microsoft Office. Android tablets cannot run Chrome Extensions, either – which means you can’t use the Annotate PRO for Google Chrome Extension.

No – not yet.

Backstory: some of our Annotate for Word powerusers had discovered a hack (clever!) that allowed them to save off versions of their library as local databases. So they could have one for a Fall assignment, another for Spring assignments – implying that they were writing feedback specific to assignments.

Annotate PRO currently supports the use of ONE library: College Edition (free), College Edition, Legal Writing Edition.

We anticipate adding cloning and sharing of libraries – much easier to do now that we’re in the cloud and working with modern technologies.

Would this feature be useful to you? Would you prefer to share libraries with colleagues before having the ability to flip from library to library? Or just have sections within a library to support different assignments (or other purposes)?