Hi All,

First, I want to thank everyone for the great insights into my after class ramble on facebook.

For some time now I have been moving towards a more digital classroom, and in the past two years – within the exception of handwritten work -all major essays are sent to me electronically. More often than not, the files are posted on TurnItin. I then download these files and correct them using Word Track Changes. There is obviously nothing revolutionary about this. Yet, as I kept doing the exact same thing over and over again, e.g. inserting a rubric, saving the file to a different name and directory, inserting standard comments, I realized I could cut down on my grading time by writing macros to handle these basic tasks. Within a very short period of time I had around 15 macros for various edits and changes to the student document. Not only did this reduce my workload, it also provided students with more consistent and elaborate feedback. After all, I don’t have to type anything I just have to press a button.

Still, as some of you may know, the macro feature on Word is a fickle mistress at best. I soon discovered this when macros started conflicting with the normal.dotm template. Furthermore, since there are a limited number of icons that you can select for each function, it soon became confusing for me to figure out what was what. Thus, I arrived at the idea to create my own app for editing Text documents. World enough and time, I would have done this over the past year, but my pesky dissertation got in the way. Therefore, I have decided to use this class to develop that app.

Now, Turnitin does have its own proprietary software available called Grademark, which I used while at Kingsborough. Unfortunately, it’s clunky and counterintuitive. Also, it features such stellar autocomments as, “Awkward, consider revising.” More practically, Hunter does not offer Grademark.

Although I used to program in C++, I’ve decided to switch to VB because it’s relatively easy to manipulate Word documents in VB. In principle, there shouldn’t be any difference between C++ and VB, but most of the documentation on how to do this is for VB. Also, I have forgotten most of the C++ I learned so long ago, so it doesn’t really matter. If there is any reason why I should consider another language say, C#, any advice would be much appreciated. At this point I’ve accepted that I’m going to have a new vocabulary anyway, so the language doesn’t matter.

On another note, I briefly pondered simply making a ribbon add-in for Word. This would be more  seamless in terms of the actual text editing, but it would not allow the user to generate automatic rubrics very easily. More problematically, it would mean running macros in Word, which in my experience leads to problems and conflicts. Perhaps I’m wrong.

At any rate, I’ve spent a couple of hours tinkering with my newly downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio Express SDK, and I came up with a small app that gives a fraction of an idea of what I intend to do. Here is a screen shot.

It’s very bland as you can see. I didn’t really see a point in jazzing it up without anything working. Right now, it simply creates a pre-formatted word document. I would post the app, but WordPress is preventing me from uploading an anonymous *.exe. Not much of a surprise there.

I hope this gives you some idea of what I’m aiming for though.