Grading in style

Allow me to take a slight break from grading to marvel at this modern world. I'm sitting in a very comfortable chair at air-conditioned Panera, far from my delightfully distracting daughters, enjoying excellent food and beverages while reading student papers that have been electronically submitted. This means I can easily put comments in the margins and make traceable corrections without making the poor students try to decipher my appalling handwriting. In many cases, students have referenced recordings that I can stream from my school's online classical music service which I can access via Panera's free (Starbucks, please take note) wireless. Some students have submitted very creative projects ('bout which more anon) on DVD, Powerpoint, wmv, etc. All, of course, easily accessed on this laptop, though the ambient music here isn't always an ideal accompaniment. Once a paper is graded, I can e-mail it to the student while saving a copy of all my comments, which makes future discussions about grades so much easier. Now, if I could just get software to do the actual grading . . .