Latest update: Google apps and Drive integration is here!!

Today's major new release enables student sign-in via Google apps accounts and integration with Google Drive!

Just about every school I talk to has jumped onto the Google apps bandwagon. It's really a no-brainer. It is the best platform on the planet and it's free for schools. Insane.

I'm super-excited to announce that as of today students will be able to sign in to EssayTagger using their Google apps accounts.

Google sign-in simplifies the process for both students and teachers while increasing reliability and security. This is already a huge win, but there's more!

Google account sign-in opens the door to integrating with Google Drive. Now students can link their Drive account and pull their assignments directly out of Drive:

Yes!! EssayTagger on your iPad!

EssayTagger's patent pending interactive grading app is built in Flash and works great in any web browser. However, Steve Jobs decided years ago that Apple would not to support Flash on iOS devices (iPad, iPhone). I've experimented with a special version of our grading app that can work as an installed iPad app, but it's a long way from being ready to put in the iTunes app store. I figured iPad support would just have to wait.

But then Alaina Langdahl of Parkrose High School in Portland, OR suggested we take a look at a few iPad web browser apps that serve as an alternative browser to the built-in Safari browser and, most importantly, they support Flash!

I'm ecstatic to announce that the Photon browser does a surprisingly good job of bringing the EssayTagger grading app to life on an iPad!

Holy awesomeness!!!

Drag-and-drop interactive grading on a tablet! This is exactly how I imagined using EssayTagger when I first started this company!

All grading app features are fully supported when used through the Photon browser. There are some important settings that will vastly improve the experience. I'll update this post soon with step-by-step instructions.


The downside
Photon browser is a $4.99 app purchase. I know, that stinks.

We have no relationship with Photon and will be evaluating other Flash-enabled iPad browsers. Hopefully a free option will emerge that offers support for all of the features required to run the grading app. Ideally Apple would finally come around and support Flash, but that's not very likely (in fact, even Android is moving away from Flash with its latest Android Jelly Bean 4.2 OS).

Until we identify a viable free solution, it'll be up to you to decide if grading on your iPad is worth $4.99.


Updates:
- Step-by-step instructions for using EssayTagger with the Photon browser are now posted!

- Alaina is reporting that she's having success with the free Puffin iPad browser. My testing with Puffin was less successful but I'll take a closer look at it as soon as I can.

Latest Update: Error marking!

Thanks to input from our users we now support a dedicated feature for marking spelling, grammar, or other errors. But this new feature is more than just a red underline. Read on to learn more!

EssayTagger is built to help teachers evaluate student work within the structure of a custom rubric and provide excellent, specific feedback to students. But instructors made it clear to us that we needed direct support to be able to mark errors--the dreaded red pen markups on a paper. It makes sense; marking a grammar error is different from evaluating a weak thesis.


Error Mark overview
The new feature makes it easy to mark problematic passages as having an error. Marked passages will have a red underline. You can enter an optional comment about the error. When a student receives her graded work, she'll see the red underlines sprinkled throughout her essay.

But here's the coolest part: all of the marked passages will be collected into a list at the end to make it easy for the student to do a follow-up correction exercise.

And just to be clear: These are errors that you determine. The grading app does not do any auto-evaluation whatsoever. EssayTagger is always driven by your brain, your expertise. We do not believe in auto-grading software!!


Let's see an example!
Error marking piggy backs on our existing "free comment" system to make it super quick and easy to mark an error.

Just select the problematic text:

And when you release the mouse button the new Mark Error/Free Comment popup box will appear:

Just click "mark as error" and the text will be underlined in red. That's it!

The student will now see this error mark in the final graded output. Here's what the student sees:

You can also enter an optional comment about the error. Comments appear in the list of marked passages at the end of the graded essay, prefaced with your initials:

Notice that the whole sentence is presented so that the underlined portion appears within its full sentence context.

Pretty damn cool, right?!

A word of advice

In most cases I recommend not entering a comment about the error. Instead hold the student responsible for reviewing her errors and thinking through them herself to figure out and learn from her own mistakes. She can seek out help if she needs it, but we shouldn't take on the responsibility of making corrections for the students when it really doesn't do them any good.

I'd much rather have students submit corrections to earn back some mechanics points rather than having me write endless "subject-verb agreement" or "you're/your" comments that the students won't even read.

Think of it as a chance to put those Active Learning vs Passive Learning PD workshops to use!


Available now!
As with all EssayTagger feature updates, this is available now to all EssayTagger users. Every time we upgrade the site, all users benefit!



Additional features coming soon
We will update the data reporting screens to include data about how many errors were marked in each essay along with aggregate data (e.g. average number of errors marked on the assignment) and individual vs aggregate performance outlier analysis (i.e. does a student have statistically significantly more errors than his peers?).

Pricing changes for 2013

With EssayTagger's growth and evolution it's time to revise our marketing emphasis and pricing model.

Reaching maturity
EssayTagger launched at the 2011 NCTE conference in Chicago as a bare-bones site that was built primarily around our innovative grading app. In the early days we were in "Open Beta" and all accounts were completely free. We then shifted to early adopter discounted pricing while continuing to expand our feature set at a nonstop pace. And because we are a cloud-based service every single feature upgrade we make is instantly available to all users (think how Google Drive constantly evolves vs installed software like Microsoft Word that forces you to buy upgrades).

The site is now a full end-to-end solution from configuring a Common Core-aligned rubric all the way to statistical analysis of your grading results and student-by-student Common Core-aligned progression tracking.

Instructors from nearly 1,000 different schools across 60 countries have graded thousands of essays in EssayTagger.

Latest Update: New data reports!

With EssayTagger's core platform in place, it's time to turn our attention to the incredibly rich data that is generated when you grade your essays in our system.

UPDATE 11/3:
We've already updated the charts quite a bit and have updated this post to reflect the changes!

UPDATE 11/29:
Even more improvements and two new charts! Post updated again.

UPDATE 11/30:
You can now download your grading data to Excel!

We've reached the first milestone of our major push to enhance and extend the data reporting features of the site. Today's release opens the first new data reports on a beta test basis. "Beta" in programmer lingo means it's not yet finalized, but is mostly where it needs to be. There will likely be further refinements based on instructors' feedback as well as minor bugs to be fixed.


Quick highlights

• "Section snapshot" overall section-wide aggregate performance graph
• "Section details" chart of all students' performance on each rubric element
• "Individual details" in-depth view of a particular student's performance on the assignment
• Statistically-significant outlier identification to help you focus on the students who are furthest from the pack.

All of these data reports are amazingly useful tools for teachers, but I'm particularly excited about the statistical analysis we're able to provide. You don't have to know the first thing about stats, standard deviation, or z-values; we're computing everything for you and flagging the kids that need your attention the most!

You grade, we crunch the numbers. How awesome is that?!

(see the demo video here: http://youtu.be/WZsEoAJEkv0)


"Section snapshot" overall results
This is the new default view; you'll be routed here automatically when you click "exit grading app" when you're done grading. It's the broadest view of the data and includes two charts. The goal is to provide a rough "snapshot" look at how your class section performed as a whole on the essays graded thus far:

The stacked column graph displays how many of your students fell into which quality levels when you evaluated their essays in the grading app.

Put simply: the more green, the better.

And... we're back!

Friday, Oct 26th, 2pm:
EssayTagger.com is back up and seems to be responding normally. See my earlier post and its live updates during the morning's downtime.


What happened?
Google App Engine suffered a worldwide outage around 9:30am (CST) Friday after which they slowly restored services. The outage knocked out major sites like Dropbox, Instagram, Khan Academy, and anyone else running on Google's infrastructure. During most of this outage EssayTagger.com was either inaccessible or experienced excruciatingly slow load times. The site reached stability around 2pm.

Is this normal?
Nope. An outage of this scale is unprecedented. Most tech folks view Google's infrastructure as being as robust and as close to invulnerable as you can get and their track history had borne that out, until this morning.

Are you going to drop Google App Engine now?
For the moment, no. This was an aberration. The realities of website hosting are that downtime happens, no matter which infrastructure you're running on. And, to be honest, I have much more faith in Google's engineers than I do in anyone else -- including myself. Yes, their system failed this morning, but in the brief 11 months of EssayTagger's life, Google App Engine has been remarkably stable and much more reliable than anything else out there.


Read Google's mea culpa, their analysis of what happened, and the new preventative measures they've put in place:
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/about-todays-app-engine-outage.html

"We know you rely on App Engine to create applications that are easy to develop and manage without having to worry about downtime. App Engine is not supposed to go down, and our engineers work diligently to ensure that it doesn’t. [...] We know that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on App Engine to provide a stable, scalable infrastructure for their applications, and we will continue to improve our systems and processes to live up to this expectation."

Site down: Google's servers experiencing problems

Friday, October 26th, 9:53am: 
The site is currently down. We run on Google's "App Engine" (GAE) infrastructure and they are currently experiencing problems that render our site -- and other prominent App Engine sites like KhanAcademy.org -- inaccessible.

Google App Engine status can normally be viewed here, but even the status page is failing to respond.

Needless to say, this is inconvenient but also rare; Google's infrastructure is among the best in the world and they rarely ever see interruptions of their App Engine service.

Interestingly, google.com search service is still functioning (as is blogger.com -- as evidenced by this post being publishable!). Not surprising that they'd have a separate set of servers for their core business.

Follow the latest updates on #GAE via Twitter:
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23GAE&src=hash

And my own Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/KeithMukai


UPDATE 11:10am
EssayTagger.com has begun to respond again, but service is intermittent. Google App Engine is not yet stable.


UPDATE 11:35am
From Google's Max Ross: "At approximately 7:30am Pacific time this morning, Google began experiencing slow performance and dropped connections from one of the components of App Engine.  The symptoms that service users would experience include slow response and an inability to connect to services.  We currently show that a majority of App Engine users and services are affected.  Google engineering teams are investigating a number of options for restoring service as quickly as possible, and we will provide another update as information changes, or within 60 minutes."


UPDATE 12:51pm
From Google's Christina Ilvento: "We are continuing work to correct the ongoing issues with App Engine.  Operation has been restored for some services, while others continue to see slow response times and elevated error rates.  The malfunction appears to be limited to a single component which routes requests from users to the application instance they are using, and does not affect the application instances themselves.

We’ll post another status update as more information becomes available, and/or no later than one hour from now."

EssayTagger.com is now responding more consistently. Cautiously optimistic that we're through the worst of it.


UPDATE 1:45pm
The App Engine status board is looking better. The error spike is returning to more sane levels but the system is still in an "elevated" problem state.

EssayTagger.com performance is still a little unpredictable with intermittent reports of documents that couldn't be uploaded to the system. We rely on Google Docs under the hood to process incoming documents so even if our site is working, this integration point with Google might still see issues.


Update 2:07pm

From Google's Christina Ilvento: "At this point, we have stabilized service to App Engine applications. App Engine is now successfully serving at our normal daily traffic level, and we are closely monitoring the situation and working to prevent recurrence of this incident.

This morning around 7:30AM US/Pacific time, a large percentage of App Engine’s load balancing infrastructure began failing. As the system recovered, individual jobs became overloaded with backed-up traffic, resulting in cascading failures. Affected applications experienced increased latencies and error rates. Once we confirmed this cycle, we temporarily shut down all traffic and then slowly ramped it back up to avoid overloading the load balancing infrastructure as it recovered. This restored normal serving behavior for all applications. 

We’ll be posting a more detailed analysis of this incident once we have fully investigated and analyzed the root cause."

So in theory EssayTagger.com and all other affected websites should be back to full power.

Announcing: Free Common Core Rubric Creation Tool!

We're super-proud to announce the release of our new tool that helps teachers create Common Core-aligned rubrics! Open to the public, totally free.

EssayTagger's Common Core Rubric Creation Tool

http://www.essaytagger.com/commoncore

You are ahead of the curve and are working hard to align your curriculum to Common Core. But assessing and tracking your students' progress within Common Core is difficult -- and nigh impossible to do for essays.

I spent the whole dang summer wrestling with the standards, trying to figure out how to incorporate them into real-world, practical writing rubrics.

My initial approach was to try to coax the actual text of the standards into a more rubric-friendly format. But teachers shouldn't have to waste their time adapting the W.8.1a text just to be able to include "Thesis" on their rubrics.

Instead just evaluate "Thesis" like you normally would but add, "Oh, and by the way, 'Thesis' is part of W.8.1a." This is where the tool comes in to help you.

On teacher accountability, pt1: The trouble with bad data

In Part 1 I lay out the case against teacher accountability measures via "value-added" analysis of standardized test score data. In part 2 I offer practical compromises.

Here in the Chicagoland area we are in the fourth day of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike that is making national headlines.

I did my Master of Education and teacher certification program at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Not surprisingly, a lot of my former classmates are current Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers. I spoke with them last night as they returned from a day out on the picket lines.

They made it clear that this was about fighting a flawed teacher evaluation system that puts undo emphasis on their students' standardized test scores. They also have serious concerns about the push to privatize the public school system. Then are the more tangible things they're fighting for like reduced class sizes (raise your hand if you think 38 teenagers in one room can be productive at anything).

The media and the average Joe on the street think this is about money or benefits or the teachers stubbornly refusing any form of accountability. This is incorrect.


Let's talk about accountability. It's important.
Accountability matters. Teachers should be held to high standards and should be judged by the quality of their work.

Understand that teachers aren't fighting accountability; they're fighting a particular form of accountability that is of dubious value and may indeed be deeply flawed.

On teacher accountability, pt2: Possible compromises

In part 1 I laid out the case against the current method of teacher accountability via value-added analysis. Here I offer what I think are reasonable compromises.

This focus on quantifiable standardized test scores is not going to go away. Some form of accountability linked to test scores is unavoidable. Period. I leave it to the statisticians to refine the analysis and reduce that 53% margin of error.

But here are some practical solutions to incorporate this data while controlling for its flaws:

Latest Update: Rubric sharing and rubric import!

Instructions for using our new rubric sharing and rubric import features!

You can -- and should -- share your EssayTagger rubrics with your colleagues and/or the whole world wide web!


Sharing a rubric
After you log in you'll notice the new top nav menu bar:

Here's a bigger view so you can read the options:

Click on "my rubrics" and you'll see the new My Rubrics page:

This page will list all of your rubrics. Pick a rubric you'd like to share and click on the "view / share" link. That will take you to the Sharing Info page for that rubric:

Latest Updates: Going global + enhanced security for student info

We are now global! 
Everyone on the planet can now grade essays faster and more efficiently!

Users from anywhere in the world can register on the site and use the free trial to grade a class set of essays (full details on the registration page).


Enhanced security for student information
Part of our to-do list for going global was to make sure that we were doing everything in our power to secure and protect students' personal information. Here are the steps we've taken:

Students' personal information is encrypted in our database using industry-standard best practices to guide our selection of encryption algorithms and encryption strength. If a hacker were to gain access to our records, s/he would only see the encrypted values:

firstName	lastName	email
BsBzpBQkQIN9s6RwV7fr58G2eY8qn2a6	yNd9sZ056n5xS14Qe5uZd3hefgY3s59i	vA8ezh8Vlm3W9WscfkFGQw4C

Each piece of information is individually encrypted in such a way that "cracking the code" for one value does not make it any easier to decrypt the other values.

In fact, EssayTagger's own internal view of the database makes students' information appear just as garbled to us as it would be to an outside hacker.

We have taken these precautions even though it is highly unlikely that our database would be compromised. We are running on Google's computing infrastructure and therefore Google's efforts to safeguard their own computers are our first line of defense. Their computing infrastructure is among the most robust and powerful in the world and any improvement they make to the security of their system automatically protects EssayTagger.com under the same umbrella.

We will never contact a student unless it is an assignment-related notification (e.g. to tell them that their graded essay is available for their review) or if there is a technical issue that requires action on the student's part in order to be resolved.

Note: Instructors can decide whether or not they want the system to collect and store student email addresses. This will allow teachers to remain in compliance if there are any local or national restrictions regarding student contact info.

We will not sell or share students' personal information with any third parties or use students' information for marketing or any purposes outside of what is required to facilitate student-teacher interaction in our system.

Students are not added to any mailing lists.

Open Beta extended and subscription bonus announced!

I have two important EssayTagger.com updates to share:

Open Beta extended
Our free Open Beta feedback period has been extended to February 10th! That gives you and your colleagues a little more time to try us out as much as you like without committing a single dime. After Feb 10th our $10/month pricing will go into effect.

I'm super-grateful for the valuable feedback we've received during this Open Beta period. So many of your questions, comments, and criticisms have really helped to guide my thinking and have already helped EssayTagger evolve.


Subscription bonus
I think you early adopters deserve to be rewarded. It takes courage and patience to dive into new technology that does not yet have a proven track record.

So I'm pleased to announce our Open Beta subscription bonus: Anyone who subscribes to EssayTagger before the end of Open Beta will receive their first month of service for $1.

Specifics:

• Commit to a subscription anytime before Feb 10th, 11:59pm (CST).
• Your first month will be $1.
• You won't be billed until Feb 11th.
• Subsequent months will be billed at our standard $10/month rate.
• Anyone is eligible--including new users--as long they commit before the deadline.
• See the FAQ for info on canceling, summer break, and group licenses.

Help us spread the word!
Now is obviously the time to try us out. Please help us build a spike of interest in these last two weeks of Open Beta!

Tweet a link to this post, blog about it, tell your colleagues and friends.

And keep that feedback coming!

Hello NCTE 2011!!

As evidenced by the many blog posts here that I don't understand, Keith has been coding like a madman since we started this thing in June. But it's now time for our public unveiling at NCTE 2011 in Chicago!

For those of you who don't know, NCTE is the National Council of Teachers of English and their annual conference just happens to be in Chicago this year and timed perfectly for our launch. So we knew we couldn't miss it, as it represents the single greatest gathering of the target audience for EssayTagger - and it's right in our home town!

Things are just getting started here, but armed with a couple of banners, laptops, and an awesome gift basket giveaway (more on that later), we're ready to show off our hard work to English teachers!

Progress update: 3,605 lines of code so far

Lines of code don't really tell you much of anything; it's all about quality over quantity and good programmers tend to code more concisely and efficiently than novice coders. But it is fun to check the numbers from time to time. Here's where I'm at thus far:

3,605 lines of actual code. That's pretty solid, especially considering that I've put a lot in place to avoid repetitive "boilerplate" code. Each Java file averages only about 50 lines of code; that's pretty light and efficient--the way I like it!

Code "comment" lines are super-important; that's where the developer explains to other developers (or him/herself) what the code is doing. Comments should count toward the total.

And even "blank" lines are important, otherwise all of your code is jammed together and is a lot less readable. I program like I write essays--with distinct paragraphs where each paragraph contains its own complete thought. Whitespace matters.

So if we add back in the comments and the blank lines, we get 5,630 lines!

Whew! Toldya I was busy!

Latest addition to the team: Mike, Visual Designer

I've tapped Mike, a former co-worker, to be our visual designer for the interactive Flash portions, the Website look-and-feel, and the EssayTagger logo!

Here are a few samples of his work:

Print work for Sony

I almost worked for these guys (or their parent company) in Austin, TX!

Mailer for the company where I met Mike: AlphaDetail, Inc.

Check out the rest of Mike's online portfolio here: mikegracedesign.com

I have reasonable aesthetic sensibilities (I am, after all, a photographer), but I really don't have the chops to be a full-blown visual designer. Having a professional visual designer of Mike's caliber working for us is a huge win; we'll look much more established and impressive than we would if it was just me hacking elements together in my spare time.

That being said, we're still a tiny organization. I'm the only full-time employee. Mike has a full-time day job and is contributing what he can in his free time. Since Mike is a friend of mine and a believer in the project, we've been able to work out an arrangement where his compensation will come in the future. This preserves our tiny cash reserves while giving Mike incentive to see us be successful; he'll profit as we profit.

I'll see if I can get Mike to occasionally post here as he develops and refines the visual design for EssayTagger.com!

Sunshine, southern California, and... recruiting?!

I lived in LA for six years so every summer I come back to enjoy the sunshine, spend time with my acrobat friends on Muscle Beach, and just relax. Well I've just arrived in LA, but this year I'm on a mission: I'm building EssayTagger.com even while I work on my tan and burning off my winter fat!

Here's the view from my "office" (aka the Marina del Rey Starbucks):

I'm also working my contacts while I'm out here. LA isn't nearly as jam-packed with tech talent as the Bay Area is (I lived up there for two years before LA), but there is a lot of development going on down here.

I have an acquaintance that I'm trying to recruit to do some of the more hard-core Flash ActionScript development. And I'm piecing together the company's advisory board; a friend of mine in Santa Monica successfully started his own social networking site (no, I'm not friends with Mark Zuckerburg) and I'm hoping to get him to sign on to advise us as we build and grow.

As you can see, building a company is very stressful

On top of that, I've got to crank through the Java development while I'm here. Our mid-August demo target comes a mere 2-3 weeks after I return from LA. I've got to get the bulk of the work done while I'm here.

So this really is a working vacation--and arguably more work than vacation (right, IRS?).

I'm going all-in!

As of today I have resigned from my teaching and coaching positions. Building EssayTagger.com will be my sole focus for the foreseeable future.

I agonized over this decision for months, but it essentially boiled down to the push and pull of two factors.

The first was that it was becoming clear that I could not function to the best of my ability in my current environment. I loved everything that was going on inside of my classroom, but--as most teachers are well aware--the frustrations outside of the classroom can become toxic and unbearable. I was working way too hard to be that unhappy.

But I don't want to dwell on past frustrations. This space is about looking ahead, working toward an exciting future.

And that's where the second part comes in.

A friend's photo, but a familiar sight. Poor Jess!

My mentor told me that grading essays was by far the worst part of being a high school English teacher. I'm sure you teachers out there know well where he's coming from. I certainly felt that pain when I had 102 Senior English Lit synthesis papers come in on the same day.

While crawling through those papers I began to dream of ways to make grading more efficient. And then a killer idea crystalized.

As the days and weeks and months went by it became more and more clear that I needed to pursue this idea. It IS the future of grading essays.

As a result, I'm pushing forward with an incredible amount of excitement that far outweighs the frustrations of the past.

I hope those of you who are teachers will forgive me for stepping off the front lines. But I believe in this product that we're building and I am confident that it will improve teachers' lives (how exactly will EssayTagger.com help you grade essays more efficiently? Well, we're still in stealth mode so you'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out).

So while I may no longer be directly impacting students, I am hoping to directly impact teachers (and, let's be honest, make a modest profit along the way!).

I also knew all along that this company would require my full attention; there was no way that I could build it in my free time and still teach and coach. I mean, "free time"?! What free time?! This was always going to be a full-time commitment.

The future looks bright
I am, by nature, a very risk-averse person. I hate gambling. I generally focus more on avoiding the worst-case scenario than shooting for the best-case scenario. It's not very exciting or sexy, but I play it safe.

And yet I have resigned from my job and am launching this startup company with zero fear. I am not up late at night, biting my fingernails, wondering if I'll default on my mortgage. Maybe I should be. Maybe I'm a fool.

18"?! Just give up!

But I know the pain that teachers feel when grading papers and I know that this product we're building can be a huge help. I know that the technology hurdles are daunting--especially since I'm about five years out of date on the latest programming tools and trends!--but I'm confident that I can overcome them. And, as you'll see in the coming weeks, I have access to some incredibly gifted and resourceful people that will be involved in the business.

I'm too optimistic and too excited about all of this to be nervous or scared. The opportunity here and the possibilities are so great that they've overridden my conservative, risk-averse nature.

I know that our profession needs as many dedicated, talented people it can find. I'd like to think I was one of the ones that fit that bill. And I am sorry to leave the ranks. But if I--if we--can make this project a reality... well then we'll all have reason to celebrate.

The plan
Obviously we are already a few weeks into this project. Luckily I've got my brother-in-law on board to help with the business side and I've been reaching out to people I know who can help out on the technology side.

We are tentatively planning a modest round of financing in mid-August to cover operating expenses for the first seven months. That's also the target for a working demo or site beta so we can show the investors what it is they're investing in.

Early September is the target for the actual site launch. We would likely begin with an open beta period for a month or so as we polish off the rough edges and continue implementing more features.

By October we should be fully up-and-running, focusing hard on spreading the word and attracting new users.

We've already figured out how to run the company for a ridiculously tiny amount of money. mostly thanks to crazy advances in technology and the fact that we'll only have one full-time employee: me! A small additional financing round will probably be necessary in March to bridge us to the point where we're making a profit.

I would like to give this company at least a year to see where we end up by September 2012. Because of the low costs of the operation, we don't need insane adoption rates to reach the break-even point. Our initial goal is to hit 1,000 paid users within the first 12-18 months; by Web terms that's just a drop of water in the ocean. There are about 125,000 high school English teachers in America, 114,000 Social Studies teachers, and untold tens of thousands of university instructors and professors that might benefit from our product. And we're just looking to nab 1,000 of them, initially.

I like our odds.


One final pic: At the peak of her insanity, Jess posted this photo with this caption:

"I r helpin u grade, cuz my grammer iz better than theirs."

And no, cats trained to grade essays is not the solution I have in mind. Though I think maybe Flynn here should be our mascot!

Hello, EssayTagger!

Thanks to Keith for that great introduction a few weeks back. Truth be told, my involvement here started over the dinner table and I managed to successfully insert myself in the business. I guess that negotiations class in b-school did come in handy!

All joking aside, this project hits two of my passions: education and technology. Education because - well, who doesn't care about education? I was blessed with a great education with some wonderful teachers back in my time, and I've always wanted to give back to improve the quality of education and teacher's lives. And technology because that's always been my interest from the first day I laid fingers on an Apple IIe back in grade school. My career to date has been on the business software side of things, so I'm looking forward to doing something really amazing to help people (and not just some organization's bottom line).

I'll be posting occasionally about education, the business as well as my non-programmer perspectives on technology. Chief Everything Officer? COO? Whatever my title, I want to have some fun and make a difference!!

Domain name purchased!

It's hard coming up with a good domain name these days. We decided that our domain name should:

• Describe the service.
• Be professional and appropriate for both teachers and students.
• (no goofy, random names--like google, moodle, GoDaddy, etc.)
• (and nothing that suggests teacher laziness: FasterGrading, EasyGrading, etc)
• And yet still be at least a little memorable.
• Be reasonably easy to spell since students may be typing in the URL.
• Last, but not least: be available for purchase!

In the early phases when I was first playing with this idea I grabbed WritingBrilliance.com. But I think you'll agree that it's too long and too prone to misspellings.

After a lot of brainstorming and a lot of registrar lookups we ended up with: EssayTagger.com.

It fits all of the criteria reasonably well and, as you'll see in the coming weeks, it really does describe our service.

I went with Register.com as my registrar. I've used them for most of my other sites and I've been happy with them. I'm put off by the flashier registrars and their marketing campaigns.