Geeky tech question follow up: scanning script magic—is it possible?

A while ago, I wrote about creating a scanning station in my classroom that would allow a student to walk up to a computer, scan a document, and it would automatically be routed to that student’s posterous blog, to allow for easy adding of written material to a sort of online portfolio.

Here’s a new, somewhat more challenging idea I’m toying with. One of the things I did this year was scan all of my student work using the school’s copier and scan to email feature. This turned out to be an awesome decision; it allowed me to go back over student work after returning tests, which was very helpful in writing comments and giving students feedback as they were working on corrections. The only problem is the when I’d scan a whole class set, I’d have one single file, and have to page through it to get to the assessment for a specific student.

So here’s my possible solution. I’d like to scan the assessments as before, but this time, by naming the scanned file, use some sort of email filter to activate a script that would take the the attached pdf and divide it into individual assessments which it would then save in individual assessment folders for my students (or perhaps email it to them).

I’ve done a bit of reading on how I can pull off some of the scripting using shell scrips and ghostscript. I could probably get apple mail to execute the script on some sort of rule.

So that’s my idea. I’m posting it here in case any of you have insights on easier/better ways to do this.

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