Nov
15
Now its my son
Filed Under AI |
In a previous post my daughter blew me away with her use of eLocker to access her school files from home. Last night my son used MyAccess to write an essay online. Big whoop - right? Get this - it analyzed and graded it in an instant. Took about 3 seconds tops and he was looking at a score that broke out scoring elements not only in spelling and grammar (Word can do that) - things like content and delivery, organization, completeness of development. It was like having my 5th grade English teacher right there - red pen in hand. It saves all of his essays and projects and graphs out a cumulative progression over time, showing improvements and areas to work on. Incredible.
Here’s a snip from the site :
With MY Access!®, students are motivated to write more and attain higher scores on statewide writing assessments. By using MY Access! in the classroom, teachers can provide students with the practice they need to improve their writing skills. The program’s powerful scoring engine grades students’ essays instantly and provides targeted feedback, freeing teachers from grading thousands of papers by hand and giving them more time to conduct differentiated instruction and curriculum planning.
I have some friends that are teachers, and while at first you might read the above and say - Wait - don’t they get paid to grade papers? Isn’t that their job? Well yes - I’d be interested to hear from some teachers to see if they like this idea of a computer grading their students. If they put those grades int the grade book or if this is just a learning mechanism. Whether you trust the computer to grade it properly. Computers do mess up, lock up, programs break, upgrades sometimes cause more problems than they fix.
I love the idea of this helping students learn to write better. If I had this growing up, My poor English teacher would have saved so much red ink on me it isn’t funny. I was the KING of run on sentences, and still am. Its the way I talk, its the way I write, get used to it. Unfortunately, she didn’t see it that way at all.
I think this is a great learning tool for students. It saves the teacher the mundane job of the continued hammering of basic writing skills into kids heads. I will say I am uncomfortable with a program like this having an impact on my son’s English grade however. I’m not sure if that grade is headed to the grade book, my son didn’t know if this was just a ‘classwork’ exercise. Plus at his age (10) I’m not sure he really grasps some of the data that is reported on the scoring page. He knows where the final grade is and a couple other elements and can see what he needs to work on - which is still a help in my opinion.
Programs run on logic and rules. There are strict grammar rules that Word follows that underline items in green that are perfectly natural to write, and probably acceptable in a school paper. I’m curious how/if the program conforms to the grade level, how it adapts to changing culture and the rules of writing.
Being a programmer gives me insight on the complexity of programs like this. I have a deep appreciation when I come across things like this - finally some technology that actually helps.
Comments
1 Comment so far
its amazing what software can do now, the best one i have seen is the remote assistance software when people can take over your mouse and computer from any location. Its really freaky!