I find it very interesting that my college-aged daughter no longer purchases the same giant textbooks that I spent hundreds of dollars on during my college career... almost every single one of her classes provides their textbook in a PDF format.  This got me thinking about the super important skill of textual annotation that we teach and require students to use across lots of different content areas and how it might be transformed to meet the needs of students who are living in a more digital world.

Here is a great article from a tech coach in California that gives some exciting ideas for digital text annotation!  Many of the built-in features of our Google platform allow Caldwell teachers to not just substitute a digital pen and PDF for a traditional paper and pencil annotation activity. Instead, we can show our kids how to use technology to really augment the annotation process with commenting features, highlighting tools, adding relevant images, modeling and mind mapping concepts, and hyperlinking to outside resources. Take your teaching up a notch on the SAMR model of educational technology integration and give our students college and career ready competencies!