It’s report card time here in secondary school land, and I’ve been using an online gradebook for at least some of my marks.  Engrade has proven to be an easy markbook to use. It prints off nice neat summaries of the assignments and their weightings, gives a running total of the mark as new assignments are entered, is accessible anywhere you have the Internet, and students/parents can look at only their marks if you give them the right code to enter.

It’s very user friendly as was attested by one of my colleagues who is not computer-comfortable. She tried it this past weekend and was impressed. The best part is that, unlike some gradebook programs, it’s absolutely free. You can’t beat that.

School doesn’t always have to be dead serious. I think school needs to be a place to ask hypothetical questions. For example, how does Godzilla generate radioactivity? Someone has actually taken the time to seriously analyze the biology of movie monster Godzilla, so why not use this offbit piece of information to keep your students interested?

And while you’re at it, Oddweek.com features some of the oddest things from the past week. Their contribution for the start of April featured some of the most interesting, exotic and “horrible” deep sea creatures, all wonderfully adapted to their environment. This one’s sure to create some interesting reactions from your students.

If you’re paying attention, you hear a lot about “Web2.0″ or those Internet applications that extend what you can do on the Net. These Web 2.0 sites may include word processors, social networking sites, or blogs.

Classroom 2.0 is about putting those Web 2.0 applications to work for the good of the average student. How to convert Web 2.0 to Classroom 2.0 is probably something that one person would have a lot of trouble figuring out on their own. Pooling the collective knowledge of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people using computers in their class would certainly help.

Well, if you thought you were alone trying to integrate technology into your class, now there’s help. The social networking site Ning now has a section devoted to the Classroom 2.0 idea. There’s room to ask questions, “meet” people working on similar ideas to you, and get inspiration from others. The site is worth look.

If one site for audio books is good, two must be better.

Like Loudlit, PodioBooks is a site with books in MP3 format. Between the two sites, there’s a pretty extensive collection of titles that are in the public domain. Unfortunately, not everything’s there yet. I just tried to find the Scarlet Letter for our English teacher, but had no luck.

Still, the price is right and more books are being added on a regular basis. It’s worth taking a look.