Here is a youtube video that demonstrates one version of the “talking to the text” strategy from Reading Apprenticeship I am using with my online 100 level writing class.
The idea of talking to the text about anything that comes into our heads can be less intimidating than the idea of annotating which sounds like everything we put down needs to be really intelligent and correct. It is easier to do in an on ground class and can be done in groups where someone else is doing the physical annotating as a recorder while the person is reading and talking to the text.
My online process is a bit different than what is in the video. The ultimate goal is to make how annotating happens extremely visible and to show there are many ways to respond to texts. I have students use Canvas Studio with both a video text and a written text in a word processing document; we do this on different weeks, not at the same time.
For the video text, they use the feature that captures both the screen and themselves; I ask them to record 3-5 minutes of them literally talking to the video as they watch it. A lighthearted example of this for students is Youtuber Kalen Allen (who got hired by the Ellen Show).
He has a lot of short videos that show him responding to recipe videos, making connections between what he expects based on his life knowledge and experience versus what is actually happening.
For the written text, they just need to capture the screen and record their audio as they use the commenting tools in their word processing program to do the more traditional talking to the text activity shown above. Again, I ask them to record the first 3-5 min. I do this when I make videos with their writing, so they do get a lot of modelling of the process.
Finally, with both, they post them on small group discussion boards, watch how their colleagues talk to the texts, and have a conversation about the similarities and differences involved in how they experienced the texts. This then leads to how their colleagues’ annotations change the way they understand the text, etc.
In contrast to the above video example, I ask a lot of questions when I read. So when I talk through my annotated documents via video which I do with every reading the following week as a review, they get another different approach to annotating.