I use Open Office 2 with primary school children. A feature that would be useful for them (and me, therefore) is a floating (or pop-up) word bar. This feature would need to allow a teacher to type in words that a pupil would need. The purpose of this word bar is to give a pupil a pre-determined list of words to use in a document. The pupil would select the word by the click of a mouse and immediately the word would appear in the document.
It would be good if each collection of words can be saved to be re-used on another occasion. A further development of the word bar would give the teacher the option of including a picture with each word. For example, if a child is writing about the Ancient Egyptians, not only would the word bar contain words such as hieroglyphics, pyramids etc, but each word would have an appropriate picture attached to it. The word bar concept could be extended into more adult writing, particularly if one is using certain words frequently, such as technical words or scientific words, or even symbols. I don't know how difficult it is to engineer such a feature as this, but I thought there may be someone who would enjoy the challenge. Thank you, Paul Brown
