Wednesday, January 21, 2009

ALEX and ACCESS

ALEX
ALEX stands for Alabama Learning Exchange. I found this site to be extremely user friendly with multiple uses. I can certainly see how this could be utilized by not only educators but students and parents alike! Although there were several reasons why I found this to be a great resource, my number one reason would be because of its versatility.

As an educator I have seen how so many of us can view lesson plans or learning opportunities in such different ways. Because of that I was tickled to see that I too could share my knowledge in hopes of assisting other educators in the same manner that I would. Not only would I uses this resource to assist in lesson plans, but I also loved the idea of being able to post questions to all of the other educators enrolled with the Alabama Learning Exchange. I signed up to be a member so that I would be able to fully utilize the website. In doing so I was able to bookmark lesson plans that I searched. This would enable me to bookmark multiple lesson plans then later go back to review and compare said lesson plans. I then would be able to modify and combine these plans to create an entirely new plan to suit my class better.

As a parent I know how overwhelming it can be to assist your children in their school work/homework. Sometimes you may feel that your child knows more than you or perhaps you may be lost as to where to go to find information to help your child grasp a certain concept. ALEX offers wonderful links that I know would be helpful in educating not only the student but also the parent. I wish I would have had this tool to offer to previous parents that were struggling with helping their children. These are web links that can be offered to the parent via the teacher. At which point the teacher could obtain specific websites from ALEX geared towards the troubled area for the parents to utilize. The teacher could also give the parents the ALEX website and allow the parents to fully examine this wonderful tool on their own.

Another way to utilize ALEX would be for the teacher to allow their students to use the one of the many websites given to help with various concepts, either as a supplement, for remedial work or for enrichment purposes. One of the sites I found helpful was Coolmath. There are games on this site that the students can use to learn, help with remediation or to enrich what is already taking place in the class. They can even continue to use these games at home with siblings or parents! After all, what kid will pass up on playing a computer game?

ACCESS
ACCESS stands for Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide. This is a great way to help our upper school children to achieve more than what we may possibly be able to offer them directly in our school system. This website is set up so that students can be offered more classes via the Internet. Students may also take AP classes that may not be offered in their school through using ACCESS.

One thing about ACCESS that I hope they will someday change is the fact that it is really only for grades 9 and up. I am an elementary educator so this website would not be all that useful for me. However, you can sign up for this as a parent. With that being said, as soon as my children reach that age you better believe that I will become a member because I can certainly see how it could open up so many more avenues for my children to follow. Who knows, maybe one day I too will become an E-educator!

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