From a special education perspective, two of the largest challenges to student academic progress that teachers face are engagement and age appropriate material.  I would also step out on a limb and say these are major challenges to all teachers.  For instance, if you want one of your middle school students to improve or master his punctuation usage, providing him handouts with See Spot Run excerpts is neither chronologically age appropriate nor is it going to capture his interest enough to actually take the exercise seriously.  I have recently started some of my teachers using noredink.org to address these very challenges and am extremely pleased with the results. 

Noredink.org is a Web 2.0 tool which allows both teachers and students to create an account and learn, drill and remediate a myriad of grammatical usage skills, but here is the kicker.  The students pick their interests such as musicians, movie stars, and magazines, and the site develops high interest questions and drills tailored to the individual student interest!  Several of my teachers have slotted between 15 and 20 minutes into their ELA lesson plans for students to sit at the computer center or utilize the classroom Xperia tablet and complete lessons on noredink.org, and they are already seeing noticeable improvements in writing mechanics in numerous students.  Students can also utilize the site at home, and a few teachers have begun assigning particular skills for homework. 

Teachers can create “classes” and monitor student progress through the site with color coded charts/graphs.  The site is free to both teachers and students, but there is a beta of a new premium addition that is a pay-for-use account.  While I have not personally tried the premium addition, it includes additional categories of instruction, augmented question banks, and more robust teacher reporting methods.