Bobby Hobgood of LEARN NC will present at the North Carolina Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Annual Conference, held February 10-12 at the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst. He and co-presenter Ann Marie Gunter will present a session titled “Building Online World Language Courses: How IT REALLY WORKS!” The presentation abstract is below:

Online courses offer students access to a language when a face-to-face course isn’t available.  Asynchronous courses, such as the critical language courses piloted through the North Carolina Virtual Public School, move students toward proficiency in all four language skills using a unique instructional design that taps into different technologies.  This session explores unique features that lead to greater student engagement and achievement, which has garnered national attention for North Carolina’s innovative approach to distance learning with world languages.

It’s not to late to apply for one-year grants of $7,500 from the A+ Fit Schools initiative. This initiative from the NC Health & Wellness Trust Fund can benefit schools by increasing physical activity and healthy eating and consequently improve academic performance and staff productivity.

Apply

There is no fee to apply for the A+ Fit School designation or grant.  Download the forms from www.aplusfitschoolsnc.org and submit by 5:00 p.m. on February 24th, 2010. For more information, please contact Kathy Crumpler at 910-270-2935.

Our most recent special ed blog post examines the claim that students living in poverty are more likely to be identified as candidates for special education services.

The Institute for the Arts and Humanities of UNC-Chapel Hill will present a digital arts and humanities festival on the UNC campus. The Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology Festival will be held Feb 16-20 and is open to the public. The festival is providing registration at no charge to all K-12 educators.

As part of the festival, the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education is organizing sessions for K-12 teachers that translate festival topics into classroom-friendly ideas for integrating technology and teaching. Hands-on workshops will feature technologies such as Voice Thread, wikis, and handheld devices. Faculty and doctoral students from UNC and N.C. State will facilitate these sessions.

CHAT will draw together the region’s diverse digital resources in performances, discussions, demonstrations, and workshops. Festival events will explore ways in which digital technologies are changing how we learn, think, know, teach, and express ourselves, both as individuals and as communities.

Walk by the old Woolworth’s store in downtown Greensboro today and you will witness something exciting happening inside. Fifty years ago, on February 1, 1960, four young black men walked into Woolworth’s and sat down on the stools at the “whites only” lunch counter in protest to segregation. More and more black students followed in their steps and Woolworth’s desegregated their lunch counters nationwide.

It is fitting on this 50th anniversary of this protest, that the new International Civil Rights Center and Museum should open on the very site that Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond took a stand against segregation. The Center will hold its grand opening on February 1, 2010.

The lunch counter and stools are the focal point of the Center and they have never been removed from this spot. In addition, 14 other exhibits tell the story of the struggle for civil rights. The museum also features an archival center, a state-of-the-art auditorium, and a children’s event space. The Center’s website has a fact sheet highlighting the exhibits.

The Center is located at 301 North Elm Street and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00am to 6:00pm and on Sunday, 1:00pm to 5:00pm. Groups of 20 or more will receive a $1 discount toward the price of tickets. To schedule a visit, call (336) 274-9199.

For instructional resources for this field trip opportunity, please visit Discover NC!

We’ve published part ten of our digital textbook for North Carolina history, on postwar North Carolina. It includes 40 pages of primary sources and readings on the Civil Rights Movement and its impact, in addition to chapters on the Vietnam War, the Cold War, postwar life, changes in North Carolina politics since 1960, and other social movements and changes of the 1960s and 1970s. And as with previous modules, the national perspective is built in, so these resources will work just as well in your U.S. history course.

Did you say forty pages?

With so much to choose from on the Civil Rights Movement, where do you begin? Here’s the outline and some highlights:

• Chapter 3, The struggle for civil rights, 1946–1959, covers early protests and strikes, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the desgregation of the military.
• Chapter 4 covers school desegregation from the 1950s through the 1970s and its impact on students, teachers, and parents.
• Chapter 5, Achieving civil rights, 1960–1965, covers sit-ins, the March on Washington, the Selma-to-Montgomery March, and federal civil and voting rights legislation.
• Additional resources are scattered in later chapters.

Some North Carolina highlights

Here are some pages and topics that will be of particular interest to teachers in North Carolina:

• The Lumbees Face the Klan: In January 1958, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on the front lawns of two Indian families in Robeson County, North Carolina. In response, as many as a thousand Lumbees violently broke up a Klan meeting, and the Klan never again met publicly in Robeson County.
• The Greensboro Sit-ins: Contemporary newspaper coverage of the Greensboro sit-ins from the day they began — fifty years ago this Monday, February 1, 1960. Includes historical background and links to more resources on the Web.
• The school desegregation chapter includes oral histories with several North Carolinians about their experiences with various phases of that movement.
• In 1969, Howard Lee became the first African American mayor elected in a predominantly white southern town since Reconstruction.

Civil rights in context

And don’t forget that the struggle for civil rights began long before the 1950s! To teach the Civil Rights Movement in context, you can refer back to earlier sections of our digital textbook:

• Read accounts of African Americans’ efforts to get an education for their children during Reconstruction, through higher education, and through the efforts of reformers like Charlotte Hawkins Brown.
• Until 1900, a few African Americans like George Henry White served North Carolina in Congress.
• Durham’s Black Wall Street was known nationally for its successful black-owned businesses.
• African American soldiers, sailors, and veterans fought for freedom and equal opportunity in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.

Finally, if you have a bit of time, you can browse all pages of the digital textbook on African American history.

Our Special Education blog returns with another look at whether minorities are overrepresented in special education.

We’ve just recorded a new video demo to help you navigate the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards. Finding resources using the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards walks you through the process of finding online courses and educational strategies on the LEARN NC website aligned to the new standards. The video is also available on the flyers, brochures, and workshop tools page.

We are proud to announce the publication of the third in a series of online digital textbooks for the study of Mandarin Chinese language. As with the Mandarin Chinese digital textbooks for level one and level two, Mandarin Chinese three is freely available and is based on the online Mandarin Chinese language courses developed by LEARN NC and taught through the North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS).

All three textbooks feature video vignettes that introduce new language and culture. Each vignette is accompanied by a transcript and vocabulary list that presents both the traditional and simplified versions of the language. The design also includes a clickable audio link for each line of the vocabulary, making it possible to hear expressions and individual words as often as you like. All video and audio can easily be downloaded to a portable device or to your computer.

The Mandarin Chinese digital textbooks were developed to support Chinese language instruction throughout the United States, but in particular in North Carolina where Chinese language instruction has seen an impressive increase in recent years, surpassing the increase in Chinese language study on a national level. While they are ideal to support and enhance Chinese language instruction in both the online and face-to-face classrooms, we hope that educators in other subject areas will consider the value of these online resources toward other teaching and learning objectives, specifically:

• Introducing Chinese culture
• Introducing the sounds of Chinese language to students who may never have heard it
• Integrating content into a global education curriculum
• Supporting heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese who want to deepen their understanding of Chinese grammar
• Teaching students some basic Chinese expressions to promote the idea of learning a second or third language
• Learning some basic Chinese expressions to make a connection with native Chinese speaking students and their parents

We are currently working on the level four digital textbook that is due for publication before the end of this calendar year. You can easily access the Mandarin Chinese level three digital textbook, as well as levels one and two, by searching for “Mandarin” from the homepage of the LEARN NC website.