March 12 Assignment
ALEX and ACCESS

I have to say I could spend hours on the ALEX (Alabama Learning Exchange)website. There is just a wealth of information available for teachers. I just looked up some lessons plans on art. I have to do a mini lesson in AED on Tuesday. The lists upon lists of lesson plans that are available is amazing. Penelope Humansky and I did our podcast on a similar site called TeacherTube.com. It was not exactly the same- it has more of YouTube vibe - but the general idea is the same. We both agreed that the site was helpful. I would imagine that she found ALEX just as useful. It is incredible the amount of information that is out for teachers. This site has more than just lesson plans. There are useful websites available, some podcasts (there were more podcast available on TeacherTube.com), links to sites such as ACCESS, and much more. Again, I could spend hours on this site.

Moving onto ACCESS(Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators and Students). I thought that this program was interesting. I did not realize that any Alabama High School student in the public school system could register for free to take these online courses. What a wonderful opportunity for some students to take things that are not offered in their schools or take classes that can help them with future classes. I believe that AP college credit courses are offered through ACCESS as well. There is also opportunity for students to take these classes in the summer. I thought that was pretty incredible.

I think this program has to be for the motivated student who wants to make the most of their time in high school. A recent survey on their site that 75% of students who take these on line courses felt that the classes were as good as or better than the classes they normally took in school. I think that is a pretty good success rate. I also like that everyone that teaches these on line courses are highly qualified and have experience in teaching AP classes. I think we will see so much more of this in the future.

Just as a side note, I thought it was pretty neat that they offered Spanish V, and Chinese I and II. Those are the classes for the extremely ambitious student.