As part of a new ongoing series, members of Northwestern IT's Teaching and Learning Technologies Team will be reviewing new digital tools, primarily add-ons which can be enabled in Canvas, to rate their potential usefulness to instructors.
Our first entry focuses on Lacuna Stories and NoteAffect.
Instructors: please note that these tools were reviewed as part of an initial evaluation and are not currently supported by Northwestern IT.
Lacuna Stories
What is it?
Lacuna Stories is a collaborative annotation platform that allows students to read texts and view multimedia. The students can make annotations and view and tag annotations made by their classmates or instructor. Lacuna Stories also offers a number of options to filter and search the annotations and a dashboard that provides visuals to interpret activity over time.
What we think about it
The ability to crowdsource the parts of text that are most important, or perhaps most challenging, could be very useful. Students could benefit from the notations of their classmates as they process the information, and instructors could view areas spots of heavy-notation as subjects for further discussion. At its heart, it’s a digital version of the very old practice of marginalia.
Rating: 3/5
NoteAffect
What is it?
NoteAffect is a new platform that offers an all-in-one, real time package for teacher presentation and student notetaking from a whatever device folks prefer. The promise is that live polling and feedback, lecture capture, learning management, and smart board systems are all integrate into the app during the live class experience and provide more meaningful artifacts for studying and actionable data to improve learning and instruction.
What we think about it
Though a platform like NoteAffect has the potential to support active learning strategies that are evidence-based and to encourage students to “make it stick” by practicing as they learn, it’s hard not to be skeptical of a single technology product that purports to solve all the challenges in learning and teaching. And their marketing copy around student and teacher data is a little creepy.
Rating: 3/5
