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"In the last eight years, high school English teacher Jeff Scheur has graded 15,000 papers. He estimates that each time he collects a new round of essays from his 150 students, it takes him about 40 hours to read them, fill out grading rubrics and write personalized feedback. Meanwhile, he questions the impact of his efforts.\n\"Students get a paper back, and you want to follow up and track if they're making progress,\" he says. \"But I realized there wasn't a good feedback loop to make that happen.\"\nHe decided to build one. Last month, he pushed the first version of a web app called NoRedInk that creates quizzes to teach grammar skills. Instead of just pointing out the grammatical mistake a student makes in papers over and over again, he now assigns him or her a specific skill quiz within the app. It's not a multiple-choice quiz. Rather, students manipulate punctuation and change words themselves. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTeachers can view how all students in a class are progressing in NoRedInk through one dashboard. Without any sort of marketing push, Scheur says about 300 of them \u2014 most in the Chicago area, where he teaches \u2014 have signed up to use it in their classrooms.\nOne strength of the product is that it's built from a teacher's perspective. Scheur noticed, for instance, that students in his classroom pay more attention when sample sentences include popular characters (Mr. T was an early favorite). In the app, students can choose interests such as NBA or Superheroes that are then included in their practice problems.\n\n\n\n\n\"Teachers tend to be very student-centered thinkers,\" Scheur says. \"Being attuned to the needs of students every day, for 'x' hours a day, for a decade has given me a sense of what motivates them.\"\nMotivating students to learn grammar is particularly important. On average, last year's graduating high school class scored lowest on the writing section of the SAT. The 49% of graduates who took the ACT's four subject tests also scored lower on average in English than any other subject. A 2007 National Center for Education Statistics Assessment found that just 24% of 12th graders performed at or above a \"proficient level.\"\nScores on similar tests are used to rate overall school performance. As Sheur put it during a recent demonstration of the app at General Assembly in New York, \"Schools in Chicago were shut down last year because students didn't know how to use apostrophes.\"\nThere's a long way to go before NoRedInk for basic grammar is finished. The current design is basic and lessons are restricted to \"Apostrophes,\" \"Subject/Verb Agreement\" and \"Commas, Fragments and Run-ons,\" but eventually Scheur hopes to incorporate more complex writing skills such as quote usage and conclusion composition into the product. \n\"Learning any skill comes down to practice,\" he says. \"[Our textbooks say,] 'here's 10 sentences for practice,' but what if that\u2019s not enough? What if a student needs 40? or 400? or 4,000?\"\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, Hafizov"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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