Using School ACCESS Labs as a Teacher Tool

The State of Alabama has recently developed a new program in many public high schools called ACCESS. The goal of this program is "to provide additional educational offerings for all Alabama public high school students." I recently visited the Robertsdale High School ACCESS lab to learn more about how ACCESS labs operate and more about the uses of ACCESS labs. The RHS ACCESS lab had a system called the Tanberg system. This system included twenty-five laptops, a projector, a student cam, an instructor cam, a document cam (ELMO), and a television and white board for images to be projected on. Some basic uses of the ACCESS program in public high schools include Internet based courses, interactive video courses, and blended courses which include both videoconferencing and Internet based instruction. The Internet based courses that ACCESS provides are courses that are delivered completely online and are taken during the regular school day. The interactive video courses are courses that use audio/visual links to link the students and the teacher. I really believe that having this kind of technology available now in schools is great. This program definitely opens up many opportunities for students at low-income schools, and it also allows students from different schools to interact with each other.

Because I plan to become an Elementary school teacher, this program does not really benefit me as a teacher right now. I hope that one day the ACCESS program will expand its goals and mission to include students of all grade levels. If I were to have this new technology available to me in the Elementary School, I would definitely love to use the videoconferencing feature in my classroom. I think that it would be great for Elementary or Middle school students to be able to connect with students across the state or even across the world. I would use this technology as a teaching tool by allowing my students maybe once a week or once a month to interact with another school to complete class projects. An example of a project may include asking the students to talk to each other about their cultural backgrounds.