Access Lab Visit

For my ACCESS Lab visit I set up a group visit with Mr. Joe Roh at Daphne High School. The ACCESS Lab at Daphne HS was in its second full year, although at the moment it is not used for too much. Mr. Roh explained to us that while the concept and idea of the ACCESS lab is great, there are many challenges the state faces and the individual schools participating face to make it work successfully. Some of these challenges are:

• Different schools all run on different bell schedules, it would take alot of effort on every one's part to come up with a streamline bell schedule just to make it work


• Schools in different areas of the state celebrate different holiday schedules


• The class offerings are not up to par yet, such as Chinese and Latin; the students have too much that is required to take "pleasure" classes


• Hiring a facilitator just to run the lab (budget cutbacks)


• When the state put out the bid requests they allowed two different vendors to provide systems for the lab to run on and surprise, surprise these two vendor's systems will not communicate with each other; so if one class has one system and the other class has the other system they can not work online together (gotta love the state process of doing things:)

While there were many challenges to running a successful lab in the future, Mr. Roh did show us a Promethium Board that just rocked! He said that the board would be something that we would be more likely to deal with in our classrooms and it just blew me away. It is like an electronic flip chart that you can save all your data and revisit it at any time. You can also download lesson plans in Promethium format from the Internet to use in your class. I can see where this board will be a must have in classroom in the very near future.