BLog Assignment 13

ALEX
website

Alex is a great website for educators in the state of Alabama. If you go to the website there are 8 sections "Courses of Study," "Web Links," "Lesson Plans," "Search," "Personal  Workspace," "Professional Learning," "Podcast Treasury," and "ALEXville."


Click on the "Courses of Study" section. There are 12 subsections you can select, based on the course you plan on teaching. I am majoring in English/ Language Arts, so I selected the "English Language Arts" subsection. You are then taken to a page where you select the grade level you are teaching. I would really like to teach college but am majoring in Secondary Education, so I selected grade 12. There are several sections which describe things you will be teaching. Once you decide what it is you want to be teaching there is a link for all of the lesson plans available.


If you click on the "Web Resources" link it will take you to a page with 6 sub categories. There are links for teacher web resources, administrator web resources, and student web resources. There is also a subcategory which allows you to search for helpful links. There is even an area to reccomend good web sites. Finally, you can report broken links and sites. 


The "Lesson Plans" page is great. You can add your own lesson plan or search for particular lesson plans by name or school. Finally there is a search engine where you can enter criteria such as subject areas and grade levels.


The next two sections are "Search" and "Personal Workspace" the "Search" page you can do two things. Your can search the "alex/thinkfinity" by entering search criteria. You can also search by narrowing down your search to 4 subcategories. In the "Personal Workpsace" section you can create your own account for the alex website. 


As a future educator I think the alex website will be very useful in my career. I think the most helpful part of the website will be the available lesson plans. 




ACCESS 
Distance Learning

ACCESS stands for Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators, and Students Statewide. On their home page it states, " Our Vision: The State of Alabama will provide equal access to high quality instruction to improve student achievement through distance learning." Access offers distance education for all Alabama Public high school students. It was started on November 1st, 2004. The website offers several courses including graduation exams, 14 advanced placement courses, test prep courses, and several other miscellaneous courses. CAST is Connecting Access Staff and Teachers. There are several resources including advanced placement test prep, alabama virtual library, alex, apt plus/ discovery streaming, chem lab, curriculum pathways, distance learning week, exam exemption form, graphmatica, hippocampus, mathtype, netrekker, and sreb.