The Highlight Tool

What it is: An add-on for Google Docs that allows you or your students to highlight, and categorize, text.

Who it will be useful for: Any teacher looking to get their students to engage with text, whether it is text they wrote, or information collected from the internet. Social Sciences, English, Business, Health, Art, etc, will all find this useful.

SAMR: This sort of thing is augmentation. We can use highlighters to highlight text without computers. This tool augments the learning because it can extract all text based on the highlight colour and place it into a categorized table.

How to Use It: This is best to see in action. Here is a video of a teacher showing you how to set it up and use it. If you don’t want to watch the video (you should), the first thing you will need to do is add the tool to Google Docs.

Click this link, or go to the Add-ons menu, choose get add-ons, and search “Highlight Tool.” Click the blue Free button.
Once installed, head back to a google document with text.

Go to the add-ons menu, scroll to Highlight Tool, and choose Start.
From there, you’ll want to create a new highlighter library.
Start highlighting! Once done, click the Extract Highlights button (by colour) at the bottom of the tool; It will generate a table of all your highlights!

Ideas:

Identify Language features. Here’s a news article that I had my Year 11s highlight. I had them create a highlighter library full of different language features, and then go through this article identifying them.
Have students create categories for information (eg Treaty of Waitangi, Maori, Pakeha, etc).
Have students identify aspects of their writing, such as quotes, explanation, etc. Have them do this before they turn it in. It will make your marking easier, and students will know if they have left anything out.

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