Text Expander in Comments for Chrome OS

Grading papers online can be a tedious task, writing the same comments over and over again.

That, or you could resort to abbreviations like sva, trans, pro#, and provide them easy-to-access resources for students to look your hieroglyphics up... only for them to ask you each time what SP stands for.

Text expanders aren't anything new, but they can save time and make it easier to leave qualitative comments. Services like turnitin.com have a handy panel with buttons for commonly used comments, but that costs money, and for those of us immersed in Google Drive, it's another platform for students to worry about.

The problem is, there are no reliable expanders to use in comments in Google Docs in Chrome OS. As of writing, none of the available Chrome extensions or apps work in this context.

Google Docs does have a text substitution feature under Tools - Preferences, but they don't work in comments. I've looked into creating a script (especially enticing possibilities with panels), but as far as my novice eyes can see, you can't programmatically insert text into comments.

Until something changes, that means I'm stuck using either Windows or Mac to grade papers, since my Chromebook is my only mobile workstation now.

This post is clearly me procrastinating from grading said papers on my work Windows desktop, so let me redeem this a little.

For Windows, I use Texter - it's a small free app. The bonus is you can install it on a flash drive, making it sorta mobile if you jump between Windows computers.

For Mac, I use Text Expander - it has a nice free trial.

For you English teachers out there, here's a list of my Texter pre-fab grammar comments - each has a URL to the corresponding help documentation on Purdue's Online Writing Lab so that students can read up on subject-verb agreement errors, parallelism, etc.

To use it, install and open Texter, and in the menu, click Bundles - Import and locate the Grammar.texter file

If anyone wants the Mac Text Expander file for grammar, let me know.

But +Google Drive and +Google in Education folks- can you pretty please allow text substitution in comments... or even better, allow programmatic insertion of pre-formatted comments? Thank you!