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Best online gradebooks to keep a record of students' progress and achievement.

Another gradebook you might be interested in is located at http://gradebookportal.com/ It is free and includes the following: --Free Online GradeBook for teachers to easily customize. Build customized weighted grading from anywhere at anytime 24/7. Grade anytime & anywhere with auto calculation term and final grades --Instant Progress Reports are intuitive and keep Students and Parents up to date --Track attendance and alert parents on absentees --Class Calendar keeps students, parents and teachers current on upcoming exams, meetings, events. Attach assignments, post homework and attach documents. --Build user logic to send email and text messages based on grades and attendance parameters --Communicate with all of your students and parents and build custom contact lists --100% secure and safe environment with several layers of encryption

What I like about it is the instant progress report! I use the gradebook of BlackBoard and I don't think that they have this feature.

Excellent site for building reading comprehension - word chart, cause/effect, story

The site offers step-by step video courses and training exercises on different technology skills that will help you build a web site, start a blog, and more.  I would use this for the 605 and 610 course.  

Contact us with comments and questions about this collection. Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction web site for educational and research purposes only. Any other use of these materials, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication, or transmission, is strictly prohibited without written permission.

Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction is a free gallery of images hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library. The gallery contains nearly 500 drawings of people conversing, scenes in houses and buildings, and objects commonly found in houses. You'll also find drawings scenes in cities, in stores, and in nature. The visuals are all drawn cartoon style without any text or speech bubbles. Applications for Education If you're looking for some visual prompts to use in your language lessons, take a look at the gallery at Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction. You can search the gallery by keyword or simple browse through the collection. 

Build your English vocabulary while reading the news.  

This article explains why the United States should build a multilingual workforce and why language instruction should be a national priority.

This tool allows you to build in questions and comments into a reading that the students can access outside of the classroom. The students can communicate within the readings to respond to questions to help check understanding and comprehension of assignments.

This sound like an interesting tool. Do you know if this works only with readings that are provided through this site or can teachers also integrate articles, or textbook excerpts?

Paper.li provides a forum for students to find TL newspaper articles and publish an online class newspaper. This could be used with upper-level students to expose them to news and authentic language materials, and allow them to create based on their interests.

This site tells how to participate in the weekly online Twitter chat with #langchat, foreign language teachers sharing ideas about a pre-determined weekly topic. This is very useful for building your PLN, and will provide links and ideas for your classroom lessons and units.

HistoryPin is a free Web 2.0 tool that allows users to "pin" photos, audio, or video to a particular world map location, much like the Google Earth program. The main idea is that, with enough participation, users will be able to get a sense of the history a location - both the visual and narrative aspects of it - as photos or videos from various time periods are pinned to that location. I can envision my students using it in partnership with another class of L1 students to share the concept of how people and places can change. For instance, both groups might focus on how a major city in their own country has changed, in order to demonstrate that to the other class via HistoryPin. Students would collect and upload photos or videos that show how the respective cities grew, how building or even fashion styles changed. They would use the HistoryPin audio option to describe the changes, my L2 students in Spanish, the L1 students in English. Once the L2 learners had "pinned" their photos on the map, L1 students could review and e-mail corrections so that L2 students could return to HistoryPin and edit their contribution. My students would do the same in return in English for the L1 students (assuming they are learning English, possibly). In this way, through collaboration, all students can gain a new perspective on how people and places look and change in another culture, while honing "technical" language skills.

605 PLN 

I am interested in using this in exchange with a Spanish-speaking country

Free PDF download of excerpts from Collier's handbook. Aside from simply creating notebooks and notes on ideas of interest, students (and instructors, too!) can use Evernote features to track to-dos, share folders, even build portfolios. Evernote provides useful tools for helping students stay organized in our fast-paced, digital device-driven world.