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SALT LAKE CITY — A new grammar app is getting a lot of attention. It helps teenagers practice English rules through real-world scenarios based on their likes and Facebook friends.
Jeff Scheur, a teacher at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, came up with the idea for "NoRedInk."
"Schools are getting shut down all over the country when kids don't make specific performance gains," he said. "That's just a shame to me, because so much of these categories the kids are being tested on, with a little bit of practice, they can get."
The app uses Facebook or Twitter or whatever the student wants to use to incorporate real-world situations and familiar names and faces for grammar scenarios.
"It pulls in students' personal information, friends from Facebook, favorite celebrities, and it generates grammar questions for them to work on. So as they are fixing errors and deciding whether sentences are acceptable, the people in the sentences are familiar to them and are fun," he explained.
Scheur says he wants to isolate problems. "If a student is having a very specific problem, if we can really drill down and address it in a fun, engaging way, that's what I'm trying to do here."
Scheur has been teaching English for eight years and has graded about 15,000 papers. He says his app will free up English teachers to spend more time on the bigger picture of critical thinking, comprehension and writing skills for students.
