ACCESS

ACCESS, or the Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide, is a distant learning program aimed at Alabama High schools. Their vision is: The State of Alabama will provide equal access to high quality instruction to improve student achievement through distance learning. It allow high school students to take part in AP and other courses that may not be offered to them in their current school. It is also a way for educators to share ideas and gain new experiences with coworkers and students.
I think that ACCESS is a great tool for students who go to schools that don't offer the classes that they need or want to take. If students don't feel challenged enough, they can go to this site and pick up another class and earn credit for it too! I think ACCESS is a great tool for students seeking to go beyond their high school for education.



The state has set these goals for ACCESS:

The goal of ACCESS is to continue to meet objectives of the ACCESS plan, expanding the availability of ACCESS Distance Learning to all public high schools in the state.

- Provide access to advanced diploma courses.
- Provide access to additional course offerings.
- Provide access to Advanced Placement and dual enrollment/dual credit courses.
- Provide access to remediation and supplemental resources.
- Leverage existing resources and distance learning offerings.
- Provide teachers with additional multimedia and tools to enhance instruction.
- Provide access to courses and resources through the Alabama Supercomputer Authority statewide network infrastructure assuring quality of service delivery.
- Utilize outside evaluation to assess weaknesses and strengths of the program in order to make appropriate adjustments to the implementation of the objectives of ACCESS.

ALEX

ALEX, or the Alabama Learning Exchange, is a easy to use tool for teachers, students, and parents. The website is http://alex.state.al.us. It is a project of the Alabama Department of Education, and is designed to compile educational materials and information into a time-saving one-stop resource for teachers and administrators in Alabama. Their goal is for Alabama's students to reap the benefits of Alabama educators sharing their wealth of expertise and knowledge with colleagues. ALEX is a way for teachers to share and write lesson plans,share and find resources, connect to course study standards, and show students the benefit of learning. ALEX has a library of lesson plans for all subjects and grade levels. Alabama teachers can log in to their account to access a personal space to create and adapt lesson plans. However, teachers everywhere can access the lesson plan library. Although lessons are targeted to Alabama state standards, they can be easily adapted to any school's curriculum. There are over 2,000 lesson plans supplied by Alabama teachers available on ALEX. These resources are designed to engage students and teachers in 21st century learning, and expand new opportunities.


I never knew that this site existed! This excites me so much because one day I will be a teacher and I will use this!!! I love that it has state-approved lesson plans on it and that it shows how long they will take. I like that it has a search engine in it, so that I can find what I'm looking for quickly! ALEX has won various awards so I know that it is a valuable teaching tool!

Mr. Chamberlain's class blog and Dear Kaia

This was so cool! I can't imagine how happy and surprised Mr. Chamberlin's class was when Kaia's dad wanted to speak to them! I bet they loved it! What a way to get students involved and getting them to love learning! When Kaia's dad wrote to the class I bet it showed them that their efforts were not in vein and that their hard work paid off! They got to talk to a real person! I see more and more of this kind of teaching and learning in the future! This is big!

My Google Form Be Poppin'

Click here to take my survey!

New Media Literacies Project

According to Newmedialiteracies.org, "Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world."

So it is a set of skills that these people from MIT came up with to help people become more technologically savvy.

The skills they talk about are:

judgment
negotiation
appropriation
play
transmedia navigation
simulation
collective intelligence
performance
distributed cognition
visualization
multitasking

I think that all of the qualities that the NML stands for will be of great importance in the future. I know that I multi-task every day, I am doing it as I type right now. I think it is going to be even more important for my children to know how to do it. There is so much to do and see now. Collective Intelligence is good because people can accomplish so much more when they are connected, rather than individually. They receive support from their PLN.

The New Media Literacies by the NML Staff

I think that all of the skills that were mentioned in this short video clip are essential to be effective in the future. I think to be an effective artist in the future you will for sure need to know about graphics on the computer and how to use photo editing and manipulating programs. To be a citizen of the future, you will need to know about collective intelligence and trans media navigation because it will be a part of your daily life. Your performance at work will be effected by your skills involving technology. I definitely know how to multitask, as do all of my friends. It's rare these days to meet someone under 30 that doesn't multitask many times a day. The pace of life is very different these days. People are no longer just consumers, they are producers. I am pretty good at judging something on the Internet and deciding if it is appropriate or not. I think that I need to work on appropriation or realizing the norms of the workspace I am in. I could work on that by getting more involved with people of higher education online and learning how to interact with them. I want these skills to connect me to something larger than my individual level.

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler

The first thing that stuck out to me in this video was the concept of 'connectivism.' I have never heard of that word before and apparently neither has the spell check tool. It is the theory that learning occurs as part of a social network of many diverse connections and ties through technology. It encourages students to strengthen the learning process by getting involved with each others learning. The student has a Personal Learning Network which he uses to keep track of websites that are beneficial to his education. He is connected and learns through sites like Delicious, Blogspot, and Google Docs. He understands that blogs are more opinions and discussions rather than facts, so he makes comments on them and gets involved in the discussions. The student takes advantage of iTunes University and other free educational sites.

I'm not sure if I am ready to be a teacher of such a networked student. I feel as if I am just now becoming a networked student myself! Maybe by the end of this class I will have the knowledge to teach such a technological student. I will try to offer guidance to that student, show what sites are reliable information, and be a guide through the internet. I hope that my students will be prepared for the future and develop PLN's that will follow them to college!

This is How We Dream Parts 1 & 2

I watched this video and thought it was really interesting. Richard Miller wrote a book and it is available online for like $0.60! I think that it is awesome that books are so readily available these days. He talked about his workspace and how it has become a laptop and his research is not library's anymore, its all online. He studied the school shootings without ever stepping into a school. He talks about how once he writes a book it leads a double-life, on the internet and in a library. In a library it is bound to one place, but having it online it is on there forever and available to anyone anywhere. It won't get thrown away or dusty on a shelf. He could add sound to documents along with the visual aspects. He used materials from the past along with materials of the present day. The document became print based and moving picture based. It was an incremental change, not a fundamental change.

I think having books online is awesome! By having sound and moving pictures in documents, it really makes them interactive. It saves time, money, gas, and paper! When you need a book on the go, they are where the internet is. I think it makes learning easier for larger groups of people and even underprivileged people.

Using iPods in the Classroom

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/12/ipodupdate.html

I found many sites on the internet talking about how useful iPods can be in the classroom. One site in particular talked about how the teacher of a special ed class recorded the test questions onto ipods for her students to listen to them while taking tests.
I looked up what Duke University was using iPods for. They give all incoming freshman a brand new iPod!!! I'm so jealous! They are using them in classrooms and enhancing the lectures. They are not banned in classrooms, they are welcomed. Ipod's are so well known in society, i think it is smart of the education arena to start using this technology. Teachers can record their lectures so that students can listen to them over and over again and even to study by! I wish my university did this!

iTunes University

www.newscientist.com/article/dn16624-itunes-university-better-than-the-real-thing.html




Even before I was enrolled in this Microcomputing class I knew about iTunes University. I saw a segment about it on the news and thought it was the coolest idea! It gives you an inside view into classrooms across the nation, and for free!!! You can go into iTunes and type in any subject that interests you and there will probably be a few college lectures on it! I found a website called newscientist.com and it found that students who downloaded lectures and then took tests scored higher than students who actually attended class! I think that this is so because students do better when studying on their own time. They make the argument that online learning is better than the real thing. Colleges all over the US are on iTunes U! I found podcasts from Harvard, Berkley, and Yale. I think that it really opens up education to the whole world!

As a teacher this tool would be useful for students who were homebound or absent. The teacher could post lectures and make them available to only the students that have an excused absence so they wont fall behind. Teachers could also post extra credit lectures or program enrichment opportunities.

Dr. Christie's Geocaching

Dr. Christie's website is full of useful information and ideas that I could use in the classroom. I was drawn to the section about geocaching! I have never been, but I want to go so bad! If you don't know what geocaching is, it is like a treasure hunt! You have coordinates and a hand held GPS and you go find the 'cache'. I think this would be cool to do with a class because it gets the students using new technology and also teaches them about geography! "Using these tools and activities gives classroom teachers opportunities to instill in students a curiosity about geography, science, mathematics and the world in which they live. GPS units are multidisciplinary, inquiry-driven, field-based tools useful across the K-12 and university curricula." Geocaching would be a great way to spend a few hours outside on a pretty day and at the same time learning about earth!

WIRED by Virgil Griffith

I have never used Wikipedia as a source for school work, as much as I may have been tempted to. However, I do use it for personal knowledge or to look up something that I have a question about. I always knew that anyone can post or edit articles on Wikipedia, that is the point of the website. In the article "WIRED" by Virgil Griffith, he talks about how he invented a tool that tracks down people that post things on Wikipedia. It also said that this doesn't always work. Say you are at Starbucks editing Wikipedia, well Griffith's tool would only trace your edit back to Starbucks not to you personally. So I think that even though this tool exists, Wikipedia will never be a creditable source for school work.