ALEX

ALEX, which stands for “Alabama Learning Exchange,” is a website that has many educational materials and resources for use by educators, students, and even parents. Some of the resources available through the website are: lesson plans, Web links, and interactive activities. There is also a site within ALEX, “Professional Learning,” which enables you to find professional development opportunities, and teaching and learning tools. ALEX has a wide variety of learning tools that can enhance the overall educational process.
Under the Lesson Plan site, educators, especially new ones, can access plans used by other teachers to incorporate into their current plan, or even to build an entirely new one. Parents and students can access any subject covered in K-12 to see what topics will be covered at any grade. The Website link gives you many different sites you can visit. One of the sites allows you to get help from an expert. The interactive site allows you to work through additional problems, like in Math, that can help increase your knowledge base. Parents can use many of the tools available in ALEX to re-educate themselves to better assist their child in any subject. This, in my opinion, can help extend the parent – child bond even through the teen years.
As a new teacher, it is easy to see that ALEX can be extremely helpful in establishing a lesson plan. Even teachers with years of experience can benefit from the information available. ALEX also gives you access to a multitude of “fun activities” that teachers from other schools have incorporated into their plans. Adding the fun activities to your lesson plan helps keep the subject exciting and in turn can help increases the likelihood for success. ALEX also gives you, the teacher, access to other teachers to ask questions that can enhance your teaching skills. ALEX is like having an experienced teacher by your side.
Another way ALEX can be used is to give homework assignments from the website. By assigning homework through the website, students may be more inclined to look at other sites available in ALEX. This also lets them know that they have access to experts who can assist those students who may need additional help. This way, students can come to class with questions and even answers to share will the other students, which again, can only enhance the overall success of all students. This seems to be the main goal anyway, right?