NC history digital textbook, part 2

Part 2 of our digital textbook for North Carolina history is now available! Called Grand visions, rough realities: The development of colonial North Carolina, it contains 67 pages of primary sources and background reading, plus guides for using the kinds of primary sources provided. In developing it, we’ve worked with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, the North Carolina Museum of History, UNC Libraries, Fort Dobbs State Historic Site, the North Carolina Literary Review, and other partners. Also included in this module are interactive maps built on Google maps technology, video animations, “zoomable” maps and illustrations, and more than 100 other photographs, paintings, illustrations, and maps.

About the digital textbook

LEARN NC’s “digital textbook” for 8th-grade North Carolina history provides a new model for teaching and learning. It makes primary sources central to the learning experience, using them to tell the stories of the past rather than merely illustrating it. Special web-based tools help students learn to read those sources and ask good questions of them. And because it’s on the web, this textbook relies on multimedia whenever possible to supplement or even replace text.

We’re publishing the online textbook in several parts, or “modules.” Part 1, Two worlds: Prehistory, contact, and the Lost Colony, was published last spring and includes an educator’s guide with lesson plans. Part 3, on the Revolutionary period, will be published this fall — we hope, in time for eighth-grade teachers to use the resources when they get to that part of the curriculum. We’re also working on lesson plans and a full educator’s guide for the colonial period. The remaining modules will roll out in 2009.

You can learn more about the digital textbook project from this flyer (PDF, 95KB).

Highlights

Highlights from the colonial module include:

• A collection of wills and probate inventories with process guides for students let them explore daily life and eighteenth-century families.
• Two interactive tools for exploring maps — Google maps and eighteenth-century maps — let students explore travel and transportation then and now.
• Primary sources and background reading about West Africa and the slave trade help students understand the origins of African American culture.
• Science integration! Video animation shows why North Carolina’s coast gets so many hurricanes, and a discussion of the longleaf pine forests combines economic and environmental history with ecology.

More to come!

A few more pieces of colonial content are planned for fall 2008. Still to come: an interactive map of one of North Carolina’s first towns, slideshows of colonial towns and homes, and video demonstrations of colonial life.

Comments?

As we develop future modules and refine the content we’ve already published, we need your help! If you use any part of the digital textbook in your classroom, please contact us to tell us how you’re using it, how your students respond, and what we can do to improve the textbook.