The first part of this assignment was to explore ALEX or the Alabama Learning Exchange. ALEX is a project of the Alabama Department of Education designed to share educational resources. These include lesson plans, podcasts, web links, and interactive activities. It is designed so that it benefits students, teachers, and parents. I am somewhat familiar with ALEX, in my EDF class last semester we used it to create lesson plans, but I decided to try and find out a little more.
I began by exploring the podcast gallery and entered the subject field that interest me, Mathematics. I scrolled through the resulting list and found a wonderful podcast created by Samford University entitled "Traveling Numbers". This tells about how numbers can show up in everyday life. I then began looking through various lesson plans and found a lesson plan by Sara Wheeler about Wheel of Fortune and probability. After this I was very interested to find out what ALEX had to offer in the Professional Learning category. I found that it has several useful tools such as different grant opportunities, school improvement, and multimedia applications.
In conclusion, I think ALEX could be a great tool for educators and one that I will definitely be using in the future. Not only can it benefit educators, but also parents who may want to enhance their child's learning experience. So go look, find, and contribute to ALEX!
Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide (ACCESS)
ACCESS is a site in conjunction with the Alabama Department of Education that provides distance learning for Alabama public high school students. It was created November 2004 to help promote equity in public schools. The objective being to offer students who may come from a more rural school or a school that doesn't offer as many courses a chance to take courses that may interest them on the internet.
I think this is a great idea, I went to a very small school and as a result of that wasn't able to take many upper level courses. For example, my high school only went up to Pre-calculus in the math field while most schools offer at least Calculus 1. Also, my high school didn't offer any Advance Placement (AP) courses. The ACCESS website makes up for those inconsistencies. While not completely solving the problem of unequal educational opportunities across the state, ACCESS is definitely a step in the right direction.
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