Resource Name: PaperRater

URL: http://www.paperrater.com

Uses: Quiz and Assess

Description: PaperRater allows students (or the teacher) to submit writing samples for informal scoring on sentence variety, vocabulary complexity, and possible plagiarism.

The results aren't incredibly insightful, but they do point out obvious errors and shortcomings. This application seems to work best on nonfiction writing.

If you're looking for a more feature rich, dynamic, but easy to use essay grading and commenting program, then you'll definitely want to check out Essay Tagger. This is a really sleek and sophisticated assessment tool that works in your browser and requires no software download, thus allowing you to use it anywhere that you can connect to the Internet. It's in beta now, but will soon go to a pay version ($10 per teacher, per month, for unlimited essays).

Applications for the Reading/Language Arts Classroom:

• Allow students to self-check and correct work before sharing with the class or group.
  
• Illustrate the difference between quoting and paraphrasing cited works.
  
• Use PaperRater from within PBWorks; it's available as a right menu bar link that says "Check for Plagiarism."
  

Notes and Caveats:

• The lowest grade for which PaperRater works is Grade 6.
• Checking nonfiction writing is much more accurate than checking fiction (narrative texts).
  

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