Hypothesis - Social Annotations

Hypothesis is a collaborative annotation tool that can be added to your readings in Canvas. Hypothesis is a great way to ground student discussion in a text or add your own annotations beforehand to guide students through difficult course readings. Students can create their own annotations (which are visible to the entire class) and respond to other students' annotations on the text.

How to Add Hypothesis

Follow the same steps to add it as an assignment: create an assignment, and in the submission type, choose "External Tool," and then click the magnifying glass to see the list of external tools. Scroll down and choose Hypothesis, then complete the construction of the assignment as you normally would.

How to Use Hypothesis

To create an annotation, select some text and click Annotate hypth-annotate. The sidebar will open with a text box allowing you to create an annotation with text, links, and/or images. By default, annotations are shared with the entire course.

To respond to an annotation, click the Reply hypth-replybutton on an existing post.

To highlight, select text then click Highlight. By default, highlights are only visible to you.

To toggle visibility of highlight on text, click the eye icon on the right sidebar:

Report an issue - Last updated: 01/22/2021