Blog Assignment 13

Image by DavidDMuir via FlickrThis week's post assignment will not be long despite how helpful the sites we were assigned are this week. ALEX, or Alabama Learning Exchange, is chock full of wonderful resources for beginning teachers. There are websites, lesson plans, activities, podcasts and more at teacher's and in some cases, student's disposal. I have used this site before, and my favorite feature is the lesson plans. I am not good at making professional lesson since I did not go the traditional route to become an educator. I have not had a methods course, so I have not been taught how to make a lesson plan. I do know how to plan a lesson that is engaging and fulfills objectives however. So, having these lesson plans for guidance really helps.

ALEX is another way for teachers to share lesson plans that really work with each other as well. Now, granted, ALEX should not be used a crutch for lesson planning. Most of the plans I viewed were from 2005. Information and new ideas change faster than lesson plans apparently do on ALEX. ALEX is not alone in this, as most things in education seem to move slower than the real world, but I digress. Even if ALEX was updated yearly, in my field, science, things tend to develop and change quickly. I will always remember sitting in my freshman astronomy class at South and Dr. Clark telling us that despite Pluto's demotion that week, we would still act like there are nine planets orbiting our Sun since the textbook said so. We all (Dr. Clark included) found this amusing as the semester progressed.

My point is, like most everything this semester, ALEX, ACCESS, AMSTI, etc. are all great tools, great resources, great jumping-off points. However, they are not final and need to be updated before being used.