AVAnnotate can be a helpful tool for teachers, archivists, and librarians facilitating use of audio and video materials. Here you’ll find pedagogical resources–including model indexes, transcription guides, and sample lesson plans–that you can use to structure the use of AV materials in your classroom. This documentation and resource bank has been designed to apply to a range of contexts, and should be considered adaptable across fields, disciplines, and educational settings.
While the AVAnnotate Annotation Guide walks you through how to create annotations in a project, this page is designed to help you think through the annotation process conceptually, especially as it pertains to teaching annotation to your students. Annotations are a basic scholarly method in the humanities for making notes within and alongside a text or artifact. Annotation always situates itself in relation to the object being annotated, and is closely related to the concepts of paratext, marginalia, and mark-up (Clement and Fisher).
What it means to annotate an artifact will look different depending on the artifact annotated, the field(s) you’re in touch with, and the goals of the project. For example, a film or video artifact may be annotated by describing its editing techniques, cinematography, script, actors, or alt-text and image description for audiences with specific access needs. An audio recording could be annotated based on speakers, environmental sounds, transcription, or distortion. Scholars across disciplines will annotate audiovisual artifacts with different goals in mind.
What are your goals for a lesson, assignment, or project utilizing AV materials? What kinds of features–sonic, visual, or linguistic–will your students be attuned to or expected to respond to? How will they know what to pay attention to in creating their annotations? Are there course themes, key terms, or learning objectives that can be exercised through an AV project? These are all conversations that may be useful to engage before introducing students to the AVAnnotate software.
In designing lesson plans and annotation assignments for students, remember that the more you and your students know about the foundational elements of annotations in AVAnnotate (including layers, indexes, and timestamps), the easier it will be to engage higher-level conversations about the functions, features, and implications of students’ observations and annotations. You can visit our How to Use page or the guides on our website for more information on the basics of AVAnnotate functionality.