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Social annotation for seminars

See your class think while they read.

Students annotate the assigned reading. BanyanIQ turns their highlights, questions, and confusions into a living map of the class's understanding — one you can triage before class and project during it.

FERPA-aware by design · anonymized peer views · no student names ever projected

One reading cycle, four moments

1

Assign the reading

Upload a PDF, share a join code. Students read in a focused annotation workspace — highlights, questions, color-coded tags, sticky notes.

2

Students construct

Every annotation is a thinking move: questioning, connecting, revising. Edits never overwrite — the revision history IS the learning trace.

3

You triage in minutes

Your dashboard shows depth (not just counts), confusion clusters, question hot-zones, and who hasn't started — before you walk into class.

4

Teach with the data

Project the Lecture Lens: click a glowing zone in the text and the class's questions appear — anonymously — to spark the discussion.

Built for how seminars actually work

Three connected surfaces — the student's reader, your dashboard, and the classroom wall.

A reader built for thinking

Six annotation tools, semantic color codes, and question flags — with an interruption-free reading flow. Annotations live beside the PDF, never inside it.

The Class Lens

After students construct their own reading, the anonymized class view unlocks: where everyone lingered, where the class got stuck, and the questions classmates anchored to each page — with “me too” voting.

Depth, not page counts

The instructor dashboard scores annotations on a knowledge-building ladder — from marking, to questioning, to connecting, to revising — and shows each student's depth-vs-breadth and six-week trajectory.

The Lecture Lens

A projector-ready view of the reading washed with class attention. Click a confusion zone, reveal the questions Kahoot-style, and dive into the exact passage — counts first, quotes on your cue.

Reveal-after-construction

Students see peers only after they've built their own interpretation — and always anonymized, enforced at the data layer. Nothing traceable ever reaches the classroom wall.

Research-grade traces

Every interaction is captured as theory-grounded trace data (knowledge building × self-regulated learning), exportable as tidy CSVs for IRB-approved studies.

For instructors

  • Know which passage to address before class — confusion clusters with the students' own words
  • Spot non-starters and declining trajectories early
  • Turn reading data into discussion, not surveillance — reflection only, never mid-reading nudges

For students

  • A focused reader that treats your annotations as ideas worth developing, not marginalia
  • See — anonymously — that classmates wondered the same thing, and build on it
  • A personal dashboard of your reading depth, streaks, and growth (your grove)

Bring your next reading to life

Set up a course in two minutes: upload a PDF, share the join code, and watch the class's thinking surface.

Create your course