ALL ABOUT ME

International Blogs In The Classroom

Julie Lindsay is a teacher in Doha Qatar. She is head of information technology at Qatar Academy. This is a teacher who uses blogs as a means of communication around the world. She explains how you can use them to participate in things going on when you cant physically be there. For instance they were having a educational conference in Philadelphia and she couldn't attend so she used her blog site to watch what was going on and to share some of her ideas too. I think that this is really neat that she could be at a conference around the world but still be in her classroom or home while doing so. With this I think that it could help out students a lot to learn and get to experience new things.






Jo Mcleay is a teacher in Melbourne, Australia and she teaches English at a secondary school and she is completing her masters of education degree. She uses blogs in the classroom to have the students post drafts that she has had the write. She explains in her blog how to use a blog and things of this sort. She also has the kids to watch different podcast and write what they think about them. She has them to discuss stories that they have read and to post their discussions. She had them to do a discussion on hurricane Katrina. I like all these ideas of using blogs in the classroom because, you don't have to worry about all those papers to bring home with you.

Classroom Blogs in the United States

I found an eight grade American history teacher who uses blogs in his classroom to have the students turn in book reports. He uses what he calls his web classroom to interact with the students. He also explains what a blog is and he also uses podcasts in his classroom. He has different links to go and see what the children have been doing. The parents can go in and get a weekly newsletter and see what is happening that week at the school. He uses his blog to put up podcasts about history so that people can listen to different things that occurred. It is really neat blog site.



There is a teacher Mr.Gates who uses a blog in the second grade class. He had the students to discuss butterfly's, gardens, and studied plants. He had the children to help a pre-k class in the greenhouse and they made gardens. Then he had the kids to talk about the gardens. He also had them write about what they know about seeds. Some children even added a picture of seeds to their blog. He uses his blog in a horticulture type class. He has the children discuss what they have learned about a particular subject. I think it's awesome to have second graders participating in this.

ACCESS

ACCESS provides the students with classes that they normally wouldnt have at their school. For instance they dont offer any advanced placement classes ACCESS helps the student to be able to take these classes. ACCESS provides high quality classroom courses and teachers via technology. They have what they call videoconferencing which is where you have a audio/visual link between two or more geographical remote sites. Which is very helpful for the students who need to take these classes.There are some great advantages to videoconferencing such as they will be taught by a highly qualified certified Alabama teacher, they will be able to interact with kids from other schools, and increased responsibility for learning. It also provides the school with more teachers, allows the teacher to grow professionaly, and allows the teacher to be apart of another school culture. The students will be able to take the course at school during the school day. Overall this is a great program for the benifit for teachers, schools, and the students.

How I would use ALEX

I would use ALEX a lot because, it is very helpful to the teachers as well as the students. You can go and get everything that you need all in one website. I would use it to get the course of study for my lesson plans. I can also go there to get lesson plans to use in the classroom. I really like the we blinks page because you can go there and get different websites to go and look at to get ideas for your classroom and it will help you with projects and other things that you need to teach a lesson. Also I would use it because, its just so easy to use. If I wanted a lesson plan on rainbows I can just go to ALEX and click lesson plans and pick a subject, grade level and type in the word rainbow and it would show me all the lesson plans about rainbows. I like the website and I would definitely use it all the time in my classroom.

ALEX

ALEX is a project of the Alabama Department of Education. ALEX gets funding from the office of Technology Initiatives, and the Federal Government. They have an executive council, a steering committee, and an advisory council. You can go to there website and click on course of study and then you can choose your course of study that goes with your lesson plan or you can go to course of study and click one of their lesson plans. They have everything from your basic courses to foreign language to health education. You can go to the lesson plans page and specify which subject such as history, english or whatever you are looking for. You can put a specific grade level you can narrow your search down by doing this so that you don't get a million lesson plans that you don't need at that moment. They have educational web links for teachers, principals, and students. These could come in handy because say you need a project for the kids to do in science but you aren't sure what to have them do then you just do to the weblinks and click on the one for teachers and then choose a subject and it gives you all the websites related to science.

They have a link called personal workspace and you can create an account and store and submit your own lesson plans or web links. Another link on their page is a place called professional learning you can go here and find proffessional development opportunities, teaching and learning tools and the latest news. They also have links for you to enhance your proffessional growth and communication. They also have what they call the distant learning program which is for students who don't have certain courses offered at their school they can use this to take them.It also provides opportunities for students statewide to engage in Advanced Placement (AP), elective, and other courses to which they may not otherwise have access to.Overall I think this is a great website.

Did You Know Video

The video was very interesting and informing. When it asks what the world will be like for the children born today how would we ever know. Look how far we have came today from what the world was like in the 1950's they had no idea what the internet was and probably couldn't have predicted we would have such a thing. Who is to say what the world might be like in 2050 people could be driving around in flying cars. The world may not even be here, they might find life on Mars by then who knows. The video shows how far we have come since the older days. Some may think that these new things are useless but they just don't want to except change. The world has to progress.

Second Post

Yay the first week of school is almost over!

My First Post!!

This is my first post ever. You are welcome to read more posts.