ACCESS

ACCESS, or the Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators, and Students Statewide, is a distance learning tool provided by the state of Alabama. Their vision is "to provide equal access to high quality instruction to improve student achievement through distance learning. It offers online courses. The website offers announcements, important dates, a list of support centers, and resources. ACCESS also provides AP, or advanced placement courses, which are college board approved,remediation modules for the Alabama High School Graduation Exams.

Access offers many resources such as AVL (Alabama Virtual Library), ChemLab, Curriculum Pathways, Elluminate, Grapghmatica, HippoCampus, Mathtype, and NetTrekker. Some of these resources require special programs or passwords from ACCESS teachers. Others are free. AVL allows students to access books, articles, and other information from the web that are normally available at public libraries. Chemlab is a specialized download that provides simulation software for educational courses, such as chemistry. Curriculum Pathways is a free online resource for students and teachers. It has web-based resources for core classes grades 8-12. Elluminate is a live multi-media collaboration tool. Graphmatica is an equation plotter. Students and teachers can print, copy, and save graphs using this tool. Hippocampus offers high-quality multi-media content for general education courses to high school students. MathType is an interactive equation editor. This tool requires a password from the Access teacher. NetTrekker provides digital content which is organized by grade and reading level.

I think that ACCESS is a great resource for distance learners. It has many tools available to students and teachers who are involved in this program. Distance learning is a good option for many students. This is a very useful resource and it seems to be very up-to-date with new technology.

ALEX

ALEX, or the Alabama Learning Exchange was created by the Alabama Department of Education. It is a program that has helpful resources for parents, students, and teacher. There are some good resources for teachers. The first one is the Alabama Course of Study. Teachers are able to access this to help them to make sure they cover all skills that should be covered in each subject they teach. It is divided by grade level. This could also be helpful for students and parents to make sure that the teachers are covering what they should.

Another resource that ALEX has is Weblinks. Links to websites are available to parents, teachers, and students on almost any topic. Teachers can use this to find information to include in lesson plans. Studens can use this to find information for projects and reports. Parents can use this to look up things that their child is studying so that they can help them. Podcasts are another resource that ALEX has that can benefit parents, teachers and students in the same way.

Lesson plans are another resource that ALEX has. Teachers can find lesson plans to use in their classroom and can share their lesson plans with other teachers. This is one of the best features of ALEX for teachers. It allows teachers to collaborate with one another and benefit from the experiences of other teachers.

I think that this site is very useful for parents, teachers and students. I wish that my parents and I had been able to use this when I was in school. It would have been great to have when doing projects. I am happy to see that Alabama provides such great resources to their teachers and students. I think that I am most excited (as a future teacher) about the lesson plans available on ALEX.

Dear Kaia

I really enjoyed watchingKaia's first photo essay and reading the other blogs and comments. There is so much new technology out there for us to use. It opens up so many doors to learn. I do not have children yet, but if I did I would be concerned about their safety just like Kaia's dad, Jabiz Raisdana. I think that it is great though that he is not living in fear and that he is exposing his daughter to technology and more importnatly the outdoors.

There are so many kids today who do not play outside. Part of this is due to technology and part is due to their laziness or their parent's laziness.Technology may be part of the reason, but it can not be blamed. Parents need to find a happy medium for their children. They need to let them play outside and spend time on the computer or playing video games.

The commments on each of the blogs were interesting. I aggreed with most of them. I think that the way Mr. C's class did a video story for Kaia is very neat.It just goes to show you that there is much to learn, even from children. This type of new technology will transform education and the way we learn. As Dr.Strange said in one of his comments, it could replace education the way we know it today, or allow it to survive.

New Media Literacies

New Media Literacies

The New Media Literacies Video named eleven skills that are needed to function and be productive in todays culture. They are skills that everyone needs to do many things that are required of them today because the average person today is both the producer and consumer of technology.

The eleven skills are: judgement, negotiation, appropriation, play, transmedia navigation, simulation, collective intelligence, performance, distributed cognition, visualization and multitasking. I think that these are skills that everyone needs. I do think that they are skills that are needed to be effective today. I believe that I have the skill of judgement, negotiation, play and multitasking. The way to aquire the skills that I lack is to be open minded and to adapt to the changes that are being made.

The New Media Literacies Project

This site explains more about media literacy and how it is used.

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler

The Networked Student

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler was an interesting video. It really made me think about how much education is changing and I'm not so sure I like it. The networked student has no textbook and the teacher rarely lectures. This is in high school, but it seems more like college!

The networked student takes control of their learning experience and collaborates with others. They build their own personal learning networked. The student will find valid websites on his subject and checks for the credibility of it. The student is taught how to do all of this before they are required to do so. The networked student will use Google Scholar to search for scholarly and peer-reviewed articles that pertain to the subject they are learning. When the networked student finds a website or article which is worth using, he will post it to his social bookmarking site where he will share the sites he's found with others and he will find site's that others have posted that may be helpful to him. The networked student will also read the blogs of others which might contribute to his learning.

The purpose of the teacher in a networked class would be to teach the students how to build their personal learning network, offers guidance, teaches the students how to communicate correctly with others in a respectful way, teaches the students how to decide what is good and bad information, and helps that students organize the information that they gather.

In my opinion I do not think that students would get as much out of a networked class as they would physically habing their teacher there everyday. As a future educator I do not like this idea because there would not be a need for as many educators as there are right now. I think that a networked class is too complex for younger students and personally if I was a parent of a middle school student who Mrs. Drexler was teaching in this way, I would be annoyed with all of the time my child would have to spend on the computer. Children do not need to have to spend so much time on the computer. They need to be active. In my opinion this idea would be good to use if students were only required to use it in completing one project. It would allow the students the best of both worlds.

Richard Miller: This Is How We Dream Parts 1 & 2

This Is How We Dream Part 1

This Is How We Dream Part 2

Richard Miller's This Is How We Dream Videos explained that our culture is changing in the way we recieve and compile information. I can remember in elementary school when we would go to the library you had to use the old timey card catalog to find out where a book was located. Now a computer is used. It's the same way with looking up information. When doing reports in elementary school I often used my grandmother's set of encyclopedias which did not have the most recent information in them. Now all I have to do is log on to the internet and the information is at my fingertips and is up to date.

Using things such as e-mail and blogs allows people to collaborate and share informaiton with one another. These are great tools to use in a classroom. By using the internet and new technology people are able to create documents with out using a pen and paper. It is important to know how to use the technology available to you so that you can benefit from it. The best way to make sure that people can transition into this new way of learning is to teach them at an early age.

In disagree with Mr. Miller about all writing being done on the computer. Paper and pencils are much cheaper than a computer and many people can not afford a computer. I also think that it is important for people to know how to write things by hand. Some things are effectively done by writing on the computer, but other things, such as a letter is not done as effectively on the computer unless it is a business letter. Letters which are handwritten seem more personal.

I think that I would be willing to write with multimedia and would try my best. I also think that children would be able to do it with alot of practice. I do not think that everyone would enjoy doing it that way.

iPods in Instruction

iPods are beggining to creep their way into schools and are becoming a very useful tool. After viewing this link, I can see just how useful iPods could be in a classroom. Duke University gave 1600 incoming freshman brand new iPods in the fall of 2004. This was part of their Digital Initiative. The students had access to many lectures and other helpful things through the iPods. They can access school information from these iPods. Many classes such as foreign languages, engineering, music and many others are incorporating the use of iPods into the classroom.

Duke University continues to give incoming freshman new iPods and the results have been phenomenal. According to this link, the academic uses for ipods were: course content dissemination, classroom recording, field recording, and study support. Sixty percent of the incomeing freshman reported that recording was the most widely used tool for academic purposes. A site that would be helpful in creating your own podcast to use for instruction can be found here.

iTunes University

Introduction to iTunes University

iTunes University is a new and exciting tool for education. It is both helpful to students and teachers. It is free and offers endless podcasts on every educational topic imaginable. It allows students and teachers to learn and teach in a new way, which allows much flexibility.

Students will probably get the most benefit from iTunes University. They can download lectures to their computer or ipod that they missed, or did not understand. They are then able to listen to the lectures as many times as they would like and even listen to only the parts that they did not understand. This would help many students who might miss class because they are sick or had an emergency.

Teachers can use podcasts from iTunes University as an educational tool for any classroom. It can even be used in Elementary school classrooms. This tool will allow teachers to share accurate information with their class in an audio form. According to another website I looked at,"iTunes University: Better Than the Real Thing",college students who heard a lecture via iTunes University scored better on an exam than students who were given a traditional lecture. This will help both students and teachers achieve their goals.

Dr. Alice Christie

Dr. Christie's Website


After exploring Dr. Alice Christie's Website I found many things that would be helpful to me as a teacher. The part I found most interesting and helpful was the information about Virtual Fieldtrips. Dr. Christie gives a "webinar," which you have to pay to see (which I did not do)about taking virtual field trips. She suggests taking virtual field trips because of all of the budget cuts that have taken place lately.

Virtual Field Trips are a great idea because as a teacher, you can take your class almost anywhere. You could take a field trip to outer space or travel back in time without ever leaving your classroom. In my opinion this is almost better than Mrs. Frizzle's Magic Schoolbus! Another great thing about Virtual Field Trips is that they are budget friendly. Virtual Field trips can save schools, teachers, and students lots of money. Another plus of Virtual Field Trips is that teachers can take their classrooms to places that noramlly a classroom would not be allowed, such as a factory, or other dangerous place.

Wikipedia

NPR Article on Wikipedia


After reading the NPR material on Wikipedia I realized just how unreliable Wikipedia is. I new that my teachers in high school never let me use Wikipedia as a source on any paper, so I had some idea that it was unreliable, but I did not know much about how it worked. I watched the NPR Podcast about Wikipedia The NPR podcast said that Virgil Griffith used IP addresses to track people who edited Wikipedia. It explained how when you edit Wikipedia you must leave your name or you can change it anonymously but it will trace your computer and can tell who edited it. The problem with this is that people can still go into places with wi-fi and edit Wikipedia without being tracked. Big companies such as Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical Co. and Diebold have all changed information concernig the companies to make them seem something they are not. This is the downfall of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a good idea, but it is getting to be so big that it is not being used as it was intended to be. The NPR article about Wikipedia says that Wikipedia is a model for 2.0 collaboration. The article also says "Still, Wikipedia's troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0 — that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization." It is important to remember that Wikipedia, although it contains a lot of good information, can not always be a trusted source.

Overall, my view of Wikipedia is that it can not be trusted. As a teacher I will allow Wikipedia to be used only when it is backed by another source.I will allow it to be used on essays and other small papers, but I will not allow it for the use on research papers.