Have You Hugged Your Accessories Today?

I'll admit it--you don't usually see me clicking in the Accessories area of the programs on the Windows computers I use, unless my calculator's out of reach for a problem too complicated to do in my head.

Today, one of the lovely English teachers with whom I organized the NaNoWriMo write-a-thon for the writing classes came to me with an unusual computer request: She was teaching poetry in one of her other courses and wanted to know if there was anything software-wise she could use to mark scansion on the poems the way a textbook would.

I did a quick check of what we had in Acrobat, but we only have Reader and no tools to mark stuff up. Rats.

Then a light bulb went off, and I opened up the Paint program. It's probably one of the worst drawing programs out there, but hey, you can type words and then draw all over them.

With a line tool so you can get scansion marks!

Yay!

The teacher I was helping isn't terribly tech-savvy, so I walked her through it one more time, and she was very excited.

It's one of those rare days it feels good to be an English major and a high school art scholarship kid. Who ended up a librarian.

Now, if the teacher had been a little more comfortable with technology, and I'd had more time to think, I could've fired up a SMARTBoard and had some real fun marking up poems.

Maybe I'll ease her into that one if I'm around next year.