An Annotation Support System for Middle School Teachers and Students in the ICDL

In this paper we describe a system for middle school students and teachers that combines the affordances of paper with the affordances of digital books. Our teacher composer tool focuses on providing teachers with tools to annotate books with reading comprehension hints for their students. The student annotation tool focuses on providing students with highlighters, stamps and sticky notes to aid them in better understanding their reading. The Interactive Workbook provides not only the functionality of a freeform note-pad, but begins to incorporate structured reading activities that teachers create to help students further explore concepts in books. Our preliminary user study shows that (something like: this tool helps students better understand books they read and helps teachers compose more comprehensive lesson plans). The tools we have designed successfully make use of paper affordances in the digital domain, giving teacher and students a powerful alternative to paper-based worksheets and books.