[germinalphrase]

I believe there is opportunity in giving teachers better tools to teach as well as they are capable.

Teaching is difficult enough from a personal performance and logistical standpoint that there is low hanging fruit in simply helping teachers be their best professional self.

For example: I have approx. 200 high school level students. If I assign them to write one page I have just given myself 200 pages of assessment to complete. Assessing writing is more cognitively demanding than simply reading 200 pages, so if I can read and provide feedback on each page in 3 minutes - working non-stop - I have 10 hours of work. I have 5 hours of prep time per week which is primarily used for preparing the 7 hours a day I spend actively in class with students. Given that we don't complete just one assignment per week - you can see the logistical difficulty.

I teach english. There are commenting/notemaking tools in almost every online word processing toolset, but none of them are streamlined for assessing writing (i.e. providing rubric based feedback, rapidly annotating with custom or pre-created notes, allowing for layered annotations to identify different structural features of writing). There's opportunity in figuring out what teachers already do and slash the time required to do it.

[hdctambien]

I completely understand. I teach AP Computer Science to about 100 students a year and I assign many Open Response questions which are solved by writing code by hand on paper. I grade these using the same rubric as the College Board which takes into account much more than "would it compile". For every hour of homework I assign my students, I assign myself double digit hours of grading.

Some AI + a pool of previously graded assignments could probably automatically pre-grade essays (or my open response questions) with comments and notations which would allow a teacher to skip the 100% correct papers, and focus on the hot-spots of the others. Automatically identifying plagiarism (via the internet and other students) would be a nice side effect, too.

Those kinds of solutions seem way more useful than Yet Another Gradebook/Attendance System or a Teacher->Parent Chat Room or even Distributed Tutoring Systems.