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Peer Review

NowComment

Reviewed:

Sep 6, 2022 by Teacher Education
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Ratings

Overall Rating: 5.0 stars
Content Quality: 5.0 stars
Effectiveness: 5.0 stars
Ease of Use: 5.0 stars
Overview:

NowComment is a collaboration app for group discussions, document annotation, and the curation of texts, images, and videos within a shared file.

NowComment makes it easy to have rich, engaging discussions of online documents no matter how large (or small) your class or collaboration group.

Type of Material:

Social Networking Tool

Recommended Uses:

  • In-class or Homework among Teams: very small groups (e.g. 4-5 students collaborating on writing projects) 
  • Whole-group Team: large groups of 50+ students

If using for education, you can 

  • discuss readings
  • peer writing feedback
  • distance learning
  • collaborative authoring
  • scholarly annotation
Technical Requirements:

  • HTML web content
  • Microsoft Word documents
  • Access to the Internet.
Identify Major Learning Goals:

NowComment makes it easy to have rich, engaging discussions of online documents no matter how large (or small) your class or collaboration group.

  • The purpose is to provide a collaboration app for group discussions.
  • Users will be able to annotate online documents in real-time.
  • Encourages rich, in-depth conversations by showing threaded comments “in context” with the original document.
Target Student Population:

  • College General Ed
  • College-Undergraduate
  • College-Graduate
  • Secondary
  • Professional

 

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

You will need to upload your documents to NowComment portal.Also the following skills are helpful:

  • ability to read the language used in the platform (i.e., the system works with any language whose text characters run left-to-right)
  • ability to edit a document online including text, video, and image content in a single file
  • ability to work with hyperlinks within documents
  • ability to manage teamwork/collaboration

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:

The tool is not content-specific; thereby offering a range of uses depending on the audience.

  • There is no absolute limit on the size of the content file. But developers generally recommend keeping documents below 50 pages.
  • Promotes higher-level intellectual discussion among students, and group-edited documents connected to discipline.
  • The learner-focused approach builds understanding of the content organically, facilitating class/group members' clarifications.
  • Learners can raise objections, suggest alternatives, ask questions, point out implications, etc. in a way that advances learning and also keeps the base document clean and easy to read.
Concerns:

  • Since PDF uploading is not quite as reliable in the platform, instructors will need to compose or export content files in MS Word.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:

The intentional engagement opportunities can be customized to support the teaching-learning goals. The interactive features also promote conceptual understanding.

This resource:

  • may improve students' ability to discuss, collaborate, edit and share course material.
  • may improve the instructor's ability to facilitate whole-group discussions in large seminar classes.
  • can be integrated within an existing Learning Management System.
Concerns:

  • Careful consideration should be given to who owns a document. In NowComment, learners suggests changes (and can comment on pros and cons of others' suggestions) but then leaves it to the document owner, acting as the editor, to decide which changes to accept.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:

The process of using NowComment is simple to navigate. There are clear steps and support features with the layout of the site.

  • Summaries let class members skim the comments to find the those most interesting and relevant to them.
  • The app appears easy to navigate.
  • Supports blogging with features and subscriptions.
  • Supports Wikis.
  • Integrates stickynotes.
  • Works with GoogleDocs.

Video overviews and guides are available for new users.

Concerns:

  • Faculty should provide a detailed overview of the app and work with IT on LTI authentication.
  • Faculty should review the section on "common problems or misunderstandings NowComment users experience".
Other Issues and Comments:

It is important to reinforce citations measures when using this tool, and endorse proper digital citizenship when collaborating with others.

Creative Commons:
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