International teachers using blogs in K-12 classrooms

The first international blog that I found was by a teacher from Windsor,Ontario, which is in the southern part of Canada. This blog does not necessarily have class objectives on it, but it have a day-by-day blog that gives the students some insight to various different things. This teacher does make the students post different assignments to the blog though. However, this is not a bad thing for everyone. The teacher has less papers to take home every night; all she has to do is log on to her computer at night now instead of keeping up with and sorting through 80-90 papers a night. The students don't have to carry binders, paper, or any other normal classroom materials to class. All they have to bring is their computer; they can just post all of their lectures to their own blog.
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This blog at first does not look like a school based blog;however, it is. The school is located in Guia, Canary Islands, Spain, where it is a language school for the students there. In the case of this blog, it is an English language. This blog has everything you would need to help you learn the English language. The way we learn our language to begin with is listening to our Moms and Dads. On this blog it has different videos the students can listen to, to help the students with their pronunciation.
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Schools using blogs in K-12 classrooms

The first blog that I found was by a 6th grade teacher in Georgia. It is really neat what she has done. She puts up on the class blog everything that they did in the class that day. So if you had to be absent one day, you could get what the class had done before you actually went to school. This is really cool, because let's say that you where absent on Thursday and you had a test on Friday. Usually teachers have a review the day before a test. This means that you would still be able to take your test and not have to worry about doing worse on the test than everyone else because you got the review too.
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This blog is not so much a classroom blog as it is an informational blog. It was set up to see how the parents and students like the idea of a new "21st century", as they call it, classroom. This classroom will be set up a lot like college is in the fact that the student will have to come see the teacher during office hours. It also has a list of the equipment and technology that will be in the classroom so that the parents can "poke at it", as the blog says, and give the teachers good feed back to see what is going to be a better leaning tool for the students.
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Picture on a blog

thefischbowl.blogspot

This video was really kind of shocking. There were many statistics that I did not realize just how high they were. For example, I did not realize that India and China had more than three million college graduates than the United States. Another statistic that was shocking was that 70% of U.S. 4-year-olds have used a computer.

These were all shocking to me because I was in middle school before I was ever allow on a computer let alone know how to operate it well. Now they tell me that 4-year-olds are not only on a computer, they're actually navigating around on the internet and all. Another thing that is absolutely amazing is how far the technology has come in just a few short years. When I got my first cell phone I was 16-years-old; and my dad was not very happy about me getting one either. On that phone you could really only send a call, receive a call, check the time, and store numbers. Now, only four years later, elementary aged kids have phones and the phones are like little computers. You can send e-mail, send text messages(which when I was 16 we did not even know what those where), and thousands of other things. In my opinion, schools need to be teaching kids how to use this technology properly because if this is how far technology has brought us in 4 years think of how far we will be in 10 more years when some of these kids will be out in the work force.

ACCESS

ACCESS stands for Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide. It is a great new program for students who are attending a school where either the teachers are not qualified to teach the courses the student needs or the school does not have the money to provide the equipment needed to have proper labs. Some of the objectives for ACCESS include advanced diploma courses and advanced placement or dual enrollment credit. These courses will help the student achieve college credit and allow them to have more challenging courses in high school to better prepare them for college. The courses offered by ACCESS will be web-based and videoconferencing, which means that the students will get experience with web-based classes (which most college classes are now) and the student also gets to see the classroom from the computer screen like they were actually in the classroom.

Although some students might think that they could take these classes at home on their own computers, one rule of ACCESS is that the courses will be taught at the students high school during regular school hours. However, one good thing about this is that the program is provided free of charge to all public high school students so there is no fees like there would be in a college web-based course. The Clanton Advertiser said "After walking into the Boaz classroom," (one of the 24 pilot schools) "it was like walking into the classroom of the future." This is a neat statement because it proves that Alabama is taking one good step forward in education.

ACCESS will help me in my classroom in many different ways. It will allow me to teach many more students who otherwise would not be able to take my course to help them prepare for college. Also, if I needed to be absent one day, I could tape my lecture and the students could still watch it and not get behind. If they had any questions they could always e-mail me to get help. ACCESS would also help me not to have so many papers to grade. I have had several web-based classes in college where the computer graded your test as soon as you finished it and then e-mailed your score to the teacher. I could teach more classes because I would not have near as much grading to do.

ALEX

ALEX is a very useful tool for teachers. When you first see the website, you will see how easy it is to use. There are eight different tabs to help teachers in a classroom. ALEX stands for Alabama Learning Exchange, and it really is a learning exhange and learning tool as you will read about in the next paragraph.



The first tab is courses of study, where there is a list of the different subjects taught in school.
Web links is the second tab, here teachers and administrators and students can go to research different areas of school. The third tab is lesson plans, where teachers can go to see lesson plans on all subjects and all grade levels. Search is the fourth tab, here teachers can search for different aspects of ALEX. The fifth tab is personal workspace, where teachers can go to store their own lesson plans and create their own web pages. Professional learning is the sixth tab, where teachers can see the Alabama Department of Education Program websites to find learning tools and professional development opportunities. The seventh tab is distance learning or ACCESS (Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide), here students can take classes, not offered at their high school, by web-based classes and video lectures from schools all over the state. Finally help is the eighth tab, where teachers can see how to set up an ALEX account and other things to help them navigate in ALEX.



ALEX can help me in many ways in my classroom. First of all, my first year as a teacher is going to be a lot easier in the fact that I will be able to see how other teachers set their lesson plans up and I will have a tool that will help me learn how to set up my own lesson plans. The web links will help me find neat math websites that I can use in my lectures. Also, personal workspace will give me a safe place to store all of my lesson plans until I get ready to use them. Professional learning will help me keep up with professional development opportunities so that I can make sure that my professional development hours are up to date. These are just a few ways that I think ALEX will be able to help me in my classroom.

About Me

My name is Megan Morgan. On August 1, 2008, I married Tim Morgan. I came to the University of South Alabama to get a degree in Secondary Math Education; graduating in 2010. Hopefully, I will be teaching math at Faith Academy after I graduate. Singing is something that I love to do. I have sang in the praise band at my church, Saraland United Methodist Church, for about six months now.