Blog Juice for Educational Technology

An interesting headline on Slashdot today. Apparently, Abiword now has beat Sun the punch to develop the first free software word processor with integrated grammar checker. We all know how big of a step this is–one more reason why students still using Microsoft Works, WordPad, or Notepad need to download Abiword.

I haven’t gotten a chance to check it out yet, but I’m wondering if they’ve managed to do anything with Word’s powerful track changes and comment feature. I’ve grown to love the functionality I get out of Word for grading papers–autotext + comments + tablet PC = RAPID RESPONSE GRADING PROCEDURE. I’m able to offer students 40+ comments (some custom, some canned) on their papers in less than 15 minutes each. The last version of Abiword didn’t have any support for Word comments, and OpenOffice Writer BETA had only a very primitive comment feature.