My favourite part of this week was learning the use chrome extension Hypothesis. I found it such a useful and simple resource that filled a empty niche. Before I get ahead of myself and get carried away just praising the functionality of Hypothesis, I should say how it could be incorporated into a classroom. The fact that Hypothesis allows for people to leave comments on webpages and posts in a community forum is amazing. As a teacher creating a class Hypothesis forum to discuss is a great idea. Often when teachers assign readings there is little engagement a disconnect can form, eyes can glass over. This chrome extension helps add a new layer of user interaction that previously wasn’t seen! It augments the existing lesson. This tool is something that I will definitely be incorporating into my music classrooms. I can find short articles on concert reviews or music theory and have the students discuss in this format at home. It gives a simple tangible piece of work that gets students to engage with each other and think critically.

My Biggest concern with the extension initially was that once a student wrote a short comment they would leave it and forget about it. This was not the case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hypothesis would notify me via email that someone else had replied to my thread which would bring me back into the dialog created. This helped prevent the, “just jumping through hoops mentality”. I used a brief screen capture from screencastify to quickly demonstrate some of the pros of this new extension.