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Public interest group Fairness.com is announcing today a new multimedia release of NowComment, its free web-based document commenting tool used for discussion of assigned readings, group collaboration projects, and annotation.NowComment is the first tool to provide fully integrated, in-context threaded discussion on all major media types: text, images, and streaming audio/video. All three can be mixed in the same document.
Unobtrusive comment balloons show which parts of a document have comments. Clicking a comment balloon shows the corresponding comments in-context, and users can then join that conversation by clicking a Reply button or start a new conversation by double-clicking the comment balloon.
The “click to comment” interface, designed for in-depth discussion at the university level, is so intuitive that it’s been successfully used with 2nd graders. Staff and students from over 1000 K-12 school districts and over 450 colleges and universities have used NowComment in a wide variety of classroom (e.g. traditional, “flipped”, online-only), research, and professional development contexts.
“NowComment allows us to have private discussions about text and has become the perfect tool for promoting discourse,” says Heidi Weber, a 2015 national PBS Digital Innovator and 2013 winner of the NCTE Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing. Her 2015 4th grade class voted NowComment its favorite digital learning tool and self-produced a NowComment infomercial .
WestEd, a leading nonprofit research, development, and service agency, pilot tested NowComment’s platform in a 6-month Professional Development course for 2000 K-12 educators. This led to a collaboration that resulted in the enhanced image and video capability, now available for the 2016-17 school year.
NowComment offers many high-end features in addition to in-context multimedia: comment sorting, track changes, a report generator, document access time controls, comment hiding, assignments, customizable notifications, embedding on other sites, built-in blogging, LTI integration, and a unique 2-field commenting structure to facilitate skimming.
Fairness.com founder Dan Doernberg expects NowComment video commenting to be popular during the run-up to the November elections. “Teachers can use it to help students engage intellectually with media, e.g. to fact check candidates’ speeches or to offer evidence of media bias. Outside the classroom, it will be great for partisan political annotation and commentary (likely friend-to-friend, conceivably even by the campaigns themselves).”
To see a NowComment demo document and screencast please visit:
URL: https://nowcomment.com/documents/58726/twopane
About Fairness.com
Public interest group Fairness.com LLC’s initial project from 2001-2008 was the Fairness.com website, a non-commercial information clearinghouse site with abstracts and heavily indexed metadata on over 22,000 fairness-related articles. Since 2008 the organization has focused on development of the free NowComment discussion tool (Turning Documents into Conversations®) used in K-12 and university classrooms around the globe.
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Contact Info:
Name: Dan Doernberg
Email: Send Email
Organization: Fairness.com LLC
Phone: (434) 975-0780
Website: https://nowcomment.com/press
Release ID: 130499
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