If you are prone to misspelling words when you’re working in a Web-based environment, then ieSpell might be just the tool you need - and best of all it’s free for personal use. According to the ieSpell Web site, "ieSpell is an Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a Web page. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of Web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs). Even if your Web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus, you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application."

Shareware is copyrighted software you can download on a free-trial basis, usually for about 30 days. Then, if you really like the software and decide you want to continue using it, you’ll be required to register for it and pay a small fee. Gradekeeper is a shareware product that is very well liked, with more than 2,000 schools across the United States and Canada currently using it. A single Grade-keeper license is $20. Gradekeeper allows users to record grades and attendance, and add students, assignments and scores to an electronic gradebook. Users can assign students password-protected access so they can see their grades online anytime. Gradekeeper works well with another shareware product called starQuiz, which is software that makes computerized tests. starQuiz costs $29.95 after a 30-day free-trial. According to the starQiuz Web site, users "can create quizzes with multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, and essay questions. Quizzes can include pictures, movies, Web links, time limits, and more. Students can take the quiz in a computer lab using starQuiz NetClient, then see their results as soon as they finish the quiz. Or, create a Web page quiz and upload it to your Web site. If you’d rather give the quiz in your classroom, print it out on paper. After students finish the quiz, you can grade essay questions and view the cumulative results in one screen. You can compare results for a student or question, see a graph, or print a report on paper. Then automatically put the scores into a Gradekeeper gradebook."

As noted on its Web site, Moodle is an open source course management system software package that is free to download, use, modify and distribute (under a General Public License). Available in 34 languages, Moodle recently released its latest version 1.1.1.

"Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and any other system that supports PHP. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and Postgre SQL are best supported, but it can also be used with Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and others."