#TeachersCoding: Improving Report Writing with CommentHelper

Whenever I start the process of report card comments, I always think of how I might make things more efficient. Text-expander? A comment bank nearby for cutting and pasting common phrases? In the end, however, I end up writing them all from scratch anyway, usually in a spreadsheet. Storing comments that way means that over the course of a year, I can see the progression of my comments for a given student. I like being able to do that, but using a spreadsheet as a writing interface is lousy.

I started thinking about my comments workflow a bit earlier than usual, so there was time to think about using code to redesign the process. I write a lot of the same things over and over again in the process of writing comments. Might it be possible to use code to make this more efficient?

The first thing I thought to do was some word analysis to figure out what phrases to use. I picked up a nifty book: Web Scraping with Python which has a chapter on language processing. There I learned about the n-gram library in Python, which has the ability to parse text for phrases of a given length. I took the text of my comments from last year and ran them through a script to create a list of three, four, and five word phrases that appeared multiple times. I then took this list and embedded it in a file that used the jQueryUI Autocomplete function to make those common phrases available.

Here was what I ended up with:

The common text area is where I put the blurb about the course that is common to each class of students. Clicking the ‘Add Common’ button adds that text to the text box below. I type the student specific text into the horizontal box below that button, and hitting the right arrow key dumps that text into the comment box below and clears out the text input. As I type into the middle text box, common phrases pop up, and I can select them with the arrow keys.

How well did this work? Well, the autocomplete thing didn’t end up being that useful. The phrases that my script picked up certainly showed up frequently in the words that I typed, but it didn’t feel like using them saved much time. The autocomplete function I put in only matches the complete text in that box, so I would have had to know in advance that I wanted a common phrase, hit the arrow key, and then start typing that phrase afterwards. Not really a time saver. I suppose curating those phrases a bit more carefully would have made for a better use of that function.

What was interesting, however, was that it was easier for me to focus when I was constantly writing in the text box, and then appending that text to the comment when I knew the text was the way I wanted it. Clearing out the text each time made it easier to say exactly what I wanted to say without having to read the entire sentence before. I occasionally moved down to the comment box to patch up the wording directly, but most of the text input was through that middle box. I wonder if clearing the box also cleared my head to let me think what I wanted to say next.

Anyway, it was a fun exercise. Feel free to adapt and use for your own purposes. You can download the code from Github as a zip file. The file comment-helper.html is the file you want to open. You could clear out the phrases in the phrases.js file and use your own.

Let me know if you try this to good effect. Happy coding, and happy Friday everyone!