Classroom Salon

Classroom Salon allows students to upload and discuss texts in such a way that their questions and comments are visibly tied to particular points in the text. You can guide this discussion by creating "tags" that students can use to mark particular issues or elements in a text -- for example, "thesis" or "passive voice," and by posting questions for students to answer, citing example passages from the text.

The current version of Classroom Salon is best for peer review of lengthy text assignments that use parenthetical bibliographic references and do not require much special formatting (i.e., heavy use of mathematical or chemical formulas). The system currently accepts only text or video uploads, and footnotes, endnotes, images, and special formatting can get lost when text is uploaded. Development on .PDF file capability is about 80% complete, so this limitation will hopefully go away soon.

For an example of how to integrate Classroom Salon into a course, see Andrea Rehn of Whittier College's Victorian Poetry class, where Classroom Salon is used to help students become more proficient and confident in identifying the formal features of poetry through guided social annotation. Professor Polly Piergiovanni's Introduction to Engineering course at Lafayette College suggests uses for Classroom Salon in STEM courses as well.