Sunday, September 07, 2003

Essay Grading Software For Teachers Essay Grading Software For Teachers Posted by timothy on Saturday September 06, @10:18PM from the sounds-better-my-12th-grade-teacher dept. asjk writes "Software to help teachers with grading has been around for sometime. This is true even with respect to grading essays. A new tool, called Criteria, will look at grammar, usage, and even style and organization. It works by being trained by at least 450 essays scored by two professionals. The difference this time? Here is a snip from the article: '"There's a lot of skepticism," Dr. Spatola said. "The people opposed see it dehumanizing the student's papers, putting them through some sort of mechanical, computerized system like the multiple choice tests. That's really not the case, because we're not talking about eliminating the human element. We're making the process more efficient."'"  [Slashdot] 2:21:30 PM

This answers the question of whether Zoe can consume RSS (it can already output RSS). It can also post to your favorite weblog tool. I still think the search based associations and simplicity of a Zoe-like tool would blow away conventional e-mail UI (in one of those insidious ways where the functionality was provided to standard e-mail clients and people slowly began to find that they spent 100% of their time in the new interface). Rather than bring the Web to e-mail it brings e-mail to the Web (Yahoo mail and Hotmail just Webified the UI for e-mail clients). This difference changes everything and could, in a fully realized tool, bring an order of magnitude more productivity to users (not just in reading and responding to messages but in publishing and manipulating content of all types). [John Robb's Weblog] 2:18:34 PM

RSSOwl 0.61b RSSOwl is an SWT-based GUI desktop client that reads RSS files from a URL or a local file. A tab folder shows RSS channel information and the headings of the selected feed. After selecting a news item, users can read the description and open the news in a tab using an integrated browser. Full-text searching (case-sensitive, entire-word, regex match) and keyword highlighting are supported. Favorites can be saved within unlimited nested categories. It also supports exporting newsfeeds to PDF, HTML, and OPML, importing newsfeeds from OPML, printing news, saving news feeds locally, and subscriptions (sharing news feeds with others). [freshmeat.net] 2:10:29 PM

X1 is "free PC software that uses an advanced indexing process that lets you find any word in any email or file on your computer, in under a second." [Scripting News] Appears to work with Outlook, OE, Eudora, and Netscape.  What about Mozilla? 2:07:17 PM