MarkLayer for Students
Studying online means tabs full of articles, lecture notes, and reference pages. None of which let you actually mark up the source. MarkLayer overlays a free annotation canvas on any webpage. Highlight text, draw arrows to connect ideas across paragraphs, pin questions to specific sentences, and share the annotated page with study-group classmates via a single link. No account, no email, no per-student licensing.
For students, MarkLayer is a free way to annotate any webpage without signing up. Useful for solo studying, group projects, and sharing marked-up sources with classmates. Threaded comments mean you can argue about a paragraph in context instead of in a Discord channel.
On this page
The problem
Online study tools either lock annotation behind subscriptions, only work inside one platform (Google Docs, Notion), or require everyone in the group to sign up before they can see what you've highlighted. Students end up screenshotting articles, pasting them into Slack, and losing the context.
Why MarkLayer fits students
- Free forever. No student subscription, no academic email check, no trial.
- Anonymous. No sign-up, no email, no profile linked to your study activity.
- Works on any webpage. Wikipedia, JSTOR free articles, blog posts, online textbook samples, course websites.
- Threaded comments mean group projects can argue specific points in context instead of in chat.
- Share links work for classmates without making them install anything.
- Multi-page projects bundle several sources into a single shareable link for a study session.
How it works
- Open the source. Open the article, paper, or web page you want to study.
- Activate MarkLayer. Click the MarkLayer extension icon to activate the annotation overlay.
- Highlight and annotate. Highlight key passages, pin questions or summaries to specific sentences, and draw arrows between connected ideas.
- Share with the group. Click "Share" and drop the link in your study-group chat. Group members see your highlights without signing up.
- Discuss in context. Replies thread on the source itself, so debates about "what does this paragraph really mean" stay anchored to the paragraph.
Frequently asked questions
- Is MarkLayer really free for students?
- Yes, 100% free for everyone, including students. No academic email check, no student tier, no future paywall planned.
- Do my classmates need an account to see my annotations?
- No. They open the share link in any browser and see the source page with your highlights and comments overlaid. Students who want to add their own annotations paste a URL at marklayer.app, which also needs no install.
- Can I use MarkLayer on JSTOR, Google Scholar, or course pages?
- MarkLayer works on any page you can load in Chrome. For paywalled content, classmates viewing the share link will need their own access to the underlying page.
- Is this better than Hypothesis for students?
- Hypothesis is built for scholarly text annotation with public groups. Great for academic settings. MarkLayer is more visual (drawings, arrows, pinned comments) and lower-friction (no sign-up). Many students use Hypothesis for class-wide reading and MarkLayer for ad-hoc study groups.
Other use cases
Try MarkLayer
Paste any URL at marklayer.app and annotate the live page in your browser. No install, no account, no sign-up. Recipients of your share links don't need to install anything either.
Annotate a page