Poetica - Edit Documents Online as if You Were Writing on Paper

Poetica is a neat new service for collaborative editing of documents. The best feature of Poetica is its similarity to writing on a paper document. While reading a document you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you write your comment. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above the line. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red.

Poetica is still in a closed beta phase. Poetica has given me 50 invitations for readers of Free Technology for Teachers. Click here to claim one of the invitations. Update at 9pm EST: The invitations went fast. You can still register for the service to be notified when more invitations become available. 

Applications for Education
Poetica supports importing Word files, PDFs, and Rich Text documents. If your school doesn't use Google Drive, Poetica could be a great tool for editing your students' written work. The visual connections between your markings and the comments could make it easier for your students to match your suggestions to specific portions of their documents.