The National Humanities Center spring professional development seminar schedule is now available. Spring 2010 begins a collaboration between the National Humanities Center and the PBS program, American Experience. To help teachers explore using American Experience as a teaching tool, they are offering two special seminars: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry and Hamilton’s America — Jefferson’s America. Both of these seminars will use materials from the appropriate American Experience episodes, which are available for free online viewing, as well as texts and documents from the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library. These unique seminars will provide teachers with primary documents and resources for use in the classroom with the American Experience episodes.

A list of all the seminars can be found on the National Humanities Center website. For North Carolina teachers, three seminars will earn one CEU credit. Also, for NC teachers, the National Humanities Center will waive the registration fee. Teachers must email Caryn Koplik directly for free registration.

In workrooms across the state, teachers are talking about the new North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards* and the new teacher evaluation instrument**. With this new evaluation, even an experienced teacher has room to grow, since each goal is measured not as an absolute, but along a continuum, from developing through accomplished. That’s a major shift, and I’ve heard from a lot of teachers worried about how to satisfy these new criteria.

LEARN North Carolina is taking measures that will make this transition easier. By the time the evaluation is implemented statewide, you’ll be able to use LEARN NC to find standards-aligned professional materials the same way you use the Standard Course of Study matrix to navigate to standards-aligned lesson plans.

We’ve already aligned our online professional development to the new standards. For example, both A Crash Course in ESL and Crossing Cultures address Standard II – “creating a respectful environment for a diverse population of student.” Next up for alignment is our extensive collection of best practices — successful strategies from North Carolina’s most engaging and innovative teachers and research-based instructional approaches you can use in your classroom —tomorrow. To help teachers make the connections between these professional resources and their practice, LEARN NC is developing a matrix of the new North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards, so teachers can easily navigate to exactly the course, article, or instructional resource they need in our collection.

We’re excited about this new development, and we hope it takes the guesswork out of dealing with the new standards. Do you have ideas on how to make it even better? We need your input to continue to meet the needs of teachers and students across the state. Leave a comment below, or feel free to send me an email.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Melissa
mthibault at learnnc.org

*North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards
**NC Teacher Evaluation instrument

The Mariposa Stories Project is designed to improve literacy in both English and Spanish through books for young children. The bilingual books also aid in fostering and further developing cultural awareness and appreciation.

The books capture the Latino/a experience in the Durham community by retelling stories from the community’s members. Duke University Spanish service-learning students conducted interviews with Latino/a students in local elementary schools and it is the children’s experiences that have been developed into the story lines of the bilingual books.

The books can be found online along with fun, educational activities related to the stories, such as crossword puzzles and word searches in English and Spanish that will aid in the development of young children’s bilingual vocabulary and reading comprehension. Hard copies, as well as the online scanned versions of the books, are distributed free of charge so that all children have the additional resources they need to succeed in school and life.

The capstone course for the Carolina Online Teacher program — the Practicum in Online Teaching — is now open for enrollment. Eligible participants can begin their practicum in the Spring semester of 2010.

The practicum is designed to be a guided first step into the virtual classroom, with help from expert online instructors. LEARN NC will be there to support you, reinforcing the best practices you learned throughout the COLT program, and addressing your questions and concerns.

Mentoring

Based on the course you teach, LEARN NC will find you a mentor from the COLT faculty. Online mentoring will consist of structured conversations via phone and email. Your mentor will also spend time in the course itself to offer advice where appropriate.

Requirements

• You may teach or adapt a shared course from the LEARN NC catalog, or you can create your own course.
• Your course must run a minimum of five weeks, with a maximum length of one semester.
• The course must be fully online. While we recognize the educational value of hybrid courses (courses where the class meets both online and offline), they are outside the focus of the COLT program.
• Though LEARN NC uses Moodle as its online learning management system, you are not required to conduct your practicum experience on Moodle. We encourage you to use whatever learning management system (LMS) is favored by your school or LEA.

Admission

• Admission is on a rolling basis.
• You must notify LEARN NC 30 days before your proposed start date.
• If you are creating your own course, it must be completed thirty days prior to scheduling your practicum.

For full details, please visit the practicum course description. If you have further questions about the practicum, please contact Bill Ferris.

Located on 59 acres of floodplain in southeast Raleigh, the Walnut Creek Wetlands Center is now open to the public. The Center provides a unique opportunity for visitors to see the plants and animals of a wetland in an urban setting. Low cost programs are available to teach “the importance of wetlands, wildlife habitats, hydrology, natural ecosystems, and human interactions with the natural environment.”

Educators can find more information about the Center in LEARN NC’s Discover NC section. Also check out the field guide, “Walnut Creek: A Guide to Exploring Urban Wetlands” created by Exploris Middle School Students. Over the course of a year, the students investigated the wetlands. Using cameras and waterproof journals, they recorded everything they saw and experienced, from tracks made by raccoons and coyotes to the lowliest leopard slugs and sea lampreys. They presented their work to the city of Raleigh in 2008 to be placed in the new Walnut Creek Wetlands Center. LEARN NC is proud to be able to bring this work to you on our site in PDF format.

North Carolina Maps is a comprehensive, online collection of historic maps of the Tar Heel State. Featuring maps from three of the state’s largest map collections — the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center — North Carolina Maps provides an unprecedented level of access to these materials. North Carolina Maps contains more than 2,000 maps, ranging in date from the late 1500s to 2000, and including detailed maps for each of North Carolina’s one hundred counties.

North Carolina Maps’ K-12 section is devoted to helping teachers use the interactive maps included in the database. Included in this section are essays instructing teachers on how to incorporate maps into the classroom, an illustrated history of maps of North Carolina, and dozens of lesson plans using the maps on the site. The lesson plans span all age groups from kindergarten to twelfth grade and every core subject from environmental science to U.S. history. Math teachers can even teach algebra using a map lesson plan!

One of the site’s most popular lesson plans is the eighth-grade lesson “Webquest: Building an Historic District.” In this lesson, students explore the city of Oxford using overlay maps that switch from 1882 to the present day, and they can find where local schools, grocery stores, and movie theaters were located.

Blog post provided by Jennifer Job, Documenting the American South/UNC Libraries

This week, our Special Education blog looks at classroom management. By being proactive and consistent and by collaborating with other adults, teachers can maintain a positive classroom environment.

We’ve just published a comprehensive guide to the writing process, from pre-writing and preliminary research through formatting and publishing. The guide is presented as a series of articles that use discussion, examples, and suggested resources to help you guide students through any writing assignment.

“A Writing Process” breaks the work down into a series of manageable tasks, which can make assignments seem more approachable to reluctant writers. The articles suggest pre-writing strategies, explore the process of writing thesis statements, discuss ways of using graphic organizers to map out ideas, share resources for evaluating the credibility of online sources, and more.

A North Carolina Humanities Council’s Teachers Institute, with experts from the Cherokee and Lumbee tribes, developed this comprehensive guide to help North Carolina educators teach their students about North Carolina’s Indians and their history. The guide, “Teaching about North Carolina American Indians,” is now available on LEARN NC’s website.

The rich heritage of North Carolina’s American Indians is presented though best practice articles, webliographies of resources that can be found in print and online, and lesson plans for 4th and 8th grades that help educators teach about the Cherokee, the Lumbee, and other tribes of our state. Teachers will also find downloadable audio files on Cherokee language and folklore, along with guides to using them in the classroom. In addition, the Lumbee English is addressed through a dialect dictionary and quiz created by the renowned North Carolina State University linguist professor, Dr. Walt Wolfram.

If you missed LEARN NC’s Fall Interactive Conference on October 1, we’ve posted video archives from all the afternoon sessions. Nine sessions in total cover project-based learning; professional development; fun, free tools for the classroom; and more content designed to save you time and help you teach more effectively.

The videos also feature a replay of the ongoing live chat. This online conversation includes supplemental links, resources, and insights from LEARN NC staff members and educators from around North Carolina — and around the country.

All session archives will open in Adobe Connect. For more information about Adobe Connect software, please see the technical requirements section of the “Details for Virtual Participants” page.

LEARN NC Fall Interactive Conference 2009 — Session archives