Blog Post 08/29/08 ACCESS Program

The ACCESS Lab or Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide is an education initiative of the Alabama Department of Education. This program provides opportunities and options for Alabama public high school students to engage in Advanced Placement, elective, and other courses that the students may not have access to in their current school location. The program was designed because many rural and low-income schools have limited course offerings for students and some school can not offer AP courses and can not offer courses such as physics, calculus, and trigonometry.
This program offers leverage of existing resources and distance learning through web-based course offerings and video conferencing. It also provides high quality classroom courses and teachers via technology. This is done by students interacting with student and teachers from other schools.
I believe that this would be a useful tool for future teachers to allow students access to many resources outside of their local school. It will also allow students to receive technology training which is always important in this fast moving world of technology.