The screen that I see when assessing student work is in something called the "speed grader." This view, for me, is easy to navigate and understand. Both the rubric comments and the other comments appear on the right. The two columns on the left are gone, so making highlights and annotations (though sometimes difficult because the mouse doesn't want to attach correctly to highlight a text, but that is a different topic) is easy. The annotations are both easy to create and easy to see.
I have included two screen shots that show how terrible the navigation is for students. This screen is no way intuitive. Students have to know to click on the "View Feedback" link. However, even when they do, the annotation page appears floating inside that tiny window, with text so small it is difficult or impossible to see, even if the student can expand the window enough to see it. The only alternative is to somehow figure out that they can either hit the full screen icon (two arrows) or the download icon to get a pdf of the annotations. At the same time, this is only a small part of their comments, because students should be looking at BOTH their annotations and their rubric comments. However, in order to see the rubric comments, instead of already being with the other comments on the right like we see in the instructor view of the speed grader, they have to notice and click on a tiny link in the upper right. To make matters even worse, when those comments pop out, they sometimes cover up the tiny annotations window.
The navigation for students to see all of their comments should be relatively intuitive. Instead, the navigation of these screens is so opaque that I often have to walk through it carefully with every student to make sure that they aren't missing my comments.
