Computer Stuff

OpenOffice / LibreOffice

Template for giving online feedback on student work.
This file contains a set of macros (you need to have your macro security setting at "Medium" and click "Enable macros" when prompted) which enable you to highlight and underline common errors easily by clicking on the buttons in the toolbar ("gr" for grammar errors, "sp" for spelling mistakes and so on).

Customising OpenOffice for Feedback on Students' Work
A guide for teachers who want to give detailed online feedback on writing; it also works as a general guide to templates, macros and autotext.

Perlconc

This is a Perl-CGI script for analysing a corpus of student writing. You can see it in action here, or visit the Sourceforge project site to get the script itself (run perldoc on it to get the documentation). Feel free to hack it and send me feedback.

Upload script

A simple Perl-CGI script to enable students to upload essays to a server. Files are uploaded and renamed (so that you don’t end up looking at a load of documents entitled “My Essay.doc”). This script does not work “out of the box”; it is something to play around with if you know a bit of Perl.

Awlcheck

A Perl-CGI script to compare the vocabulary of a text to a word list (normally the Academic Word List, hence the name). You can see it in action here and download the source code here.

Using different fonts in LyX

LyX is a clever document processor which “breaks away from the obsolete typewriter concept”; i.e., what you see is not what you get; what you see is what you mean.

Not a basic guide—this is something I submitted to the LyX documentation team. The document is in LyX 1.5 format; there is also a LaTeX version.

Lyx Font Samples

For use with the previous document—shows what some common LaTeX fonts look like. It’s a LaTeX file, so run latex on it and view the outputted DVI file, if it manages to produce one. If it doesn’t, edit out the fonts which it can’t handle and try again.