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Re: [school-discuss] English teacher apps

> Quite possibly. There are many things that teachers still do better than
> computers. A computer might be a good replacement for a bad teacher, but
> it is rarely even close to a good one.

Yes, I agree, however, but the good teachers can be made great by applying the tools that help the teachers better analyze an entire group's needs. I'm looking for apps that help remove the drudgery of pointing out that ending a sentence with a preposition is bad form, that one must start a sentence with a capital letter and if you make a spelling mistake it is the student's responsibility to correct it.

I was driving home this evening and could think of scripts, off the top of my head, that would make all English teacher's lives much more productive...

*histogram of all words a student uses diffed against the Academic Word List
*a search that isolates and meta tags all items found in the style report
*a script that reads the target vocab list and verifies that those words appear in student's paper
*a script that verifies that students are not finishing their sentences with a preposition

The debate over how well a teacher and a computer can 'teach' a student how to write will rage until we have true AI, which I don't think is all that far off. Until then, teachers need applications that help them analyze great gobs of text sifting for common errors and helping the teacher identify the most pressing need. If you know of any apps like the ones described above in the OS world I would be much obliged if you could pass them on to an overworked, undersupported teacher trying to make the most of mankind's most powerful tool. We, as OS enthusiasts and promoters, will not get much attention from the rest of the teaching world until we can point to tools like the one's mentioned above to make teacher's jobs easier.

many thanks,
Dennis Daniels

ian wrote:
On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 12:28, robin wrote:


Dennis Daniels wrote:
Hello Quentin
I use style and diction daily. I've been looking at how to set regex into the search params of diction to make sure students don't end a sentence with prepositions, for example.

Style needs a better reporting scheme too... some kind of app/ script that can take all of a students papers and process their style reports into a database for better growth tracking.

OS education tools need to make jobs easier for teachers in order to get more pull in the district office board room discussions. I don't know if you saw that the State of Indiana is now using an electronic essay grading system... OS could / should cobble something that does half of that App and make it available to teachers... /dream
I don't like the idea of electronic grading. Sure, the website claims that the software always comes within a few points of human markers, but I suspect that is more a reflection on the humans than the software. If such a system comes into widespread use, students will quickly learn to write to the software and produce high-scoring drivel.

Quite possibly. There are many things that teachers still do better than
computers. A computer might be a good replacement for a bad teacher, but
it is rarely even close to a good one.