I think everyone wants to maximize the time they spend doing enjoyable things and minimize the time they spend doing drudgery.
Similarly, I think we’d all like to spend less time carrying assignments around, marking them up and handing them back to students, especially when not all the students get their papers back the first time around. minimize drudgery. David Sivers, founder of CD Baby, created a way to automatically send an email when a CD shipped to its purchaser. That was one less thing someone had to do.
Wade Roberts is using a combination of Dropbox and iAnnotate on the iPad. He basically receives assignments from students through Dropbox and grades them with audio annotations through iAnnotate on his iPad.
A couple more ways to accomplish this are through Turnitin.com (which is scheduled to release an iPad app later this year) and Google Drive. Turnitin.com has a really slick interface (called grademark) for annotating and grading student papers with stock comments, new original text comments and audio comments. The app will even feature offline grading, so you can grade on the beach…or in your carpool. The student gets immediate feedback on their assignment. learn.ly or 121writing.com allows you to make audio annotations via Google Drive. Pretty slick, I think.
