Annotate for MAC Users

Thanks to some very excited English teachers and a constant stream of emails from interested Mac users, we now have a version of Annotate for Word that runs on Mac Office 2004.

Yes, that was five years ago, but progress is progress.

With the latest release of Mac Office (2008), Microsoft dropped support for Visual Basic for Applications, which is what we wrote the older version of Annotate with (the Word 2007 version is written using .NET). But just as with Word 2007 on the Windows side of the world, many teachers haven’t bothered upgrading. So there are still a lot of Word 2004 computers out there, and we hope to help a lot of those computers help their owners create better feedback for their students.

The free version of Annotate for Word 2004 for Mac Office 2004 (we haven’t figured out a more elegant way to name the thing that is also specific enough) isn’t quite ready, but we’ve got a number of PRO users going already. So don’t hesitate to be in touch…

http://www.11trees.com/annotate-for-word.html

Annotating Student Work with Microsoft Word

UPDATE: Annotate for Word is now a commercial product (as of September 2008). You can learn more about the free and PRO versions of Annotate for Word by visiting www.11trees.com.

We’ve made considerable progress designing Annotate – an add-in for Microsoft Word. Here are some recent screenshots.

Annotate Ribbon for Word 2007: Citation Drop Down Showing
(click image for a larger version)

The above screenshot shows the different categories of comments available in Annotate: Commenting, Argument, Style, Organization, Citations, and Mechanics. Because citation issues can be so detailed, there is a drop down list with multiple choices. To insert a pre-written comment, the instructor simply highlights text, then clicks on a button in the Annotate Ribbon (or selects a more specific item from a drop down).

After clicking or choosing, a comment like the one below appears:

(click image for a larger image)

In the above example, the “Place Citations” button was clicked, and a simple Post-It note appeared in the text. Notice that the student’s work (the selected text above) has been pulled out, turned purple (a nice neutral color), and the note is automatically inserted. This note takes advantage of a including some additional Advice and a Reference to Purdue’s fantastic OWL site.