I have a question where the kids need to identify that a segment is a “diameter” of a circle. I had it coded to not be case sensitive, but one of my kids left a space after "diameter ". I’m wondering what ideas people have for error detection in situations like this one.
Multiple choice. 
Yea, I’m using multiple, card sort in others. Trying to get them to talk about the math while moving them towards more precision with their language. Not right off the bat of course, but in the arc of moving from informal, “intuitive”, whatever they bring to the table sort of stuff to the more precise. A piece I am struggling with (more) in this distance learning situation is helping kids lock stuff in place. To get them to do more than “clickity click” and move on. I think Desmos AB, as well as all the deep work Desmos is doing in terms of computer enhanced math instruction, the great examples they are pushing out, the great community they are building are all headed in the right direction. It’s just hard. So I am trying to come back at stuff in multiple directions. It is definitely an ongoing learning experience for me! Indeed 
Adding on to Daniels comment, we strongly discourage doing string comparisons to check correctness, because you will frequently incorrectly mark kids wrong.
Multiple choice (as Daniel mentioned), card sort, or just leaving it ungraded if you need it to be a free response are much more reliable options.
I get that. In this case (maybe in a lot) I think about grading as triage. If I can narrow down which students I need to check in on, that helps. Of course there is a significant chance of false negatives in this case in particular, but… Also, it feels to me that there is something different about having to write in a word rather than choose from a list, or do a card sort. Pedagogical value of each mode of response?? All of this is so tough in a distance learning situation.
I agree with what you’re saying. For any text input, maybe you could turn on the option to share with the class? I’ve still been using those questions even though we’re asynchronous. If the students read through other responses, they can get a general idea of whether or not they are on the right track. Maybe you could even add a screen immediately after the short answer response that asks if they disagree with any of the answers on the previous question after reading the responses? I know it’s not an immediate check, but it avoids the clicking until correct problem that you mentioned before.
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If you opt for mutliple choice and don’t want them to blindly click until getting the right answer, you could limit the number of times they can try by disabling the submit button after some number of tries. Obviously, have a note indicating as much.
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