Ed Tech Tuesday: Perusall

In my Facebook group called The Online Educator, we had an awesome member mention an Ed Tech tool called Perusall. This tool was new to me, so I thought I might do some research and share some info about it with you awesome educators!

Perusall is a social reader/annotation tool that can be used to increase the amount of effective reading that students do. This tool allows students to collectively annotate a reading and also respond to each other’s comments. One additional feature that I think is pretty awesome is a "student confusion report" which is a one-page summary of concepts that students had trouble or engaged with. The instructor can then follow-up on those points. 

Since I had never used the tool before, I watched a brief video to get an overview of how it worked. One thing I liked a lot was the interface that seems very similar to social media which most students are pretty familiar with. 

Although I use a lot of different tools in my online classes, I don’t have any that serves the specific purpose of helping student to interact with their readings in this way. The Perusall site reports that 20-30% of students complete their assigned readings, which is not surprising, but certainly highlights the need for change in this area. 

I’m hoping to give this tool a shot next semester but would love to know if this is a tool you have used in the past and how you have used it. Let me know in The Online Educator group!