Big Hurdle to Digital Portfolios Cleared!

So I've spent a few years now thinking about the move to digital portfolios. The biggest hurdle, ironically, was something rather minor--how do I score students' written work submitted digitally and then preserve it as PDFs while maintaining my feedback using the "comments" function in Word or Pages? I need the PDF format so that scores don't--uh hum--get changed after I send the scored documents to the students for uploading/linking on their Google Sites (our platform for the digital portfolios).

I looked this issue up online, asked colleagues, even tweeted about it with my PLN (personal learning network)--nothing. Then it occurred to me: Why don't I just take the "sandbox" approach that I'll be encouraging with my own students once they have the iPads? So I went into both both Word and Pages and created test documents as if they were files that students had submitted to me via Moodle for scoring and feedback. I used the "comments" function in both apps to respond to portions of text, and I inserted a text both with the scoring category, the rubric score, and the numerical score. I then "saved as . . ." a PDF--and it worked just fine! I even printed the PDFs, and they still looked great. I really need to try the sandbox approach more often!