Summary
Perusall is an e-reader platform that centers student discussion around the reading of an electronic text. Instructors provide students with access to a digital text in Perusall. When students view the reading, they can add public questions and comments as annotations to the text. Discussion threads develop around places in the reading that spark student interest or generate questions for them. Perusall can be integrated into Canvas using an LTI.
Tips
CIRT strongly recommends reaching out to an instructional designer in CIRT to help set up this LTI integration, particularly if it is your first time using it.
Add Perusall to Canvas
Once the Perusall LTI has been set up and integrated with your Canvas account, you are ready you create a Perusall activity.
- Create a new assignment in your Canvas course.
Note: This may be counterintuitive to use an Assignment rather than a Discussion; however, in order to integrate Perusall, it must be created as an Assignment. - Edit the Assignment details and change the submission type to External Tool.
- Then, select the option to Find an External Tool URL.
- Scroll through the list of external tool options to select Perusall.
- Make sure the box is checked to Load This Tool In A New Tab and select Save.
- Go back into the assignment itself and click to Load Perusall Discussion in a new window.
- When you first get started working in Perusall, you must begin by answering several questions to initiate your course.
- There are several options for the type of content that can be added for students to interact with including Perusall books, web pages, as well as documents that are saved to your computer (PDF, EPUB, Word, or PPT). Next you want to add the document/text you want students to interact with under the Library tab.
- Once you have uploaded a text to the library, select the Assignment tab and Add an assignment.
- You’ll need to scroll through each page of the assignment settings to make sure you select the options you want for the assignment as well as points and due date.
- The name you give the assignment should match up exactly with the name in Canvas so that the LTI works properly.
- Once you save the changes to the activity, go back to the assignment in Canvas and click to load the assignment in a new window. The reading should load directly to the new window and students now have access to the assignment.
