What is Kami?
Kami is a free website and Chrome extension that can help with note-taking. It offers annotation tools such as highlighting, underlining, commenting, and adding text boxes to documents. It also provides Text Recognition (OCR).
What are Kami's features?
The free version of Kami offers basic annotation features like highlighting, underlining, strike-throughs, commenting, and adding text boxes.
More than a usual document annotation, Kami offers freehand and box highlighting to make it easy for large blocks of text and for scanned PDFs that may not register as text. You can also free-draw in a variety of line weights and colors. In the same vein, you can also add various shapes and lines in different line weights (or filled), transparencies, and colors. You can also use the text box tool to add notes in different colors or create comments attached to text or a place on the page.
Additionally, Kami offers a Google Drive auto-save feature, support for G-suite and Office Suite files, and an optical character recognition (OCR) tool.
What are Kami's limitations?
Kami is free but does have paid options, meaning there are some features behind a paywall. These include image and signature insertions; image, screen capture, and video comments; an equation editor; a dictionary; page additions; and speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities.
Both the paid educational and paid professional plans offer these tools, but the professional plan is $10/month for one user, while the teacher plan is $99/year. The teacher plan provides access to one teacher and up to 150 students alongside integration with Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas.
What are the benefits of Kami?
Kami’s features can benefit a variety of students, such as those with annotation-intensive courses. Being able to switch to dark mode (found in account settings) can help reduce eye strain both in darker environments and for those sensitive to screen usage. Having an OCR tool can allow for inaccessible file types to be converted into more accessible forms. Some students may have difficulty handwriting notes and annotations either some or all of the time, so having the option to add text boxes and large highlights can be beneficial.
Unfortunately, some of the more beneficial options are behind a paywall, such as speech-to-text and text-to-speech and voice and video comments. Despite this, the simple interface and video tutorials offered can make this an easy tool to use.
How can you access Kami?
For more information and to download Kami, click here to view Kami’s website. Under the “Learn Kami” tab, you can find video tutorials and training videos, from the basics to subject-specific tools.