Archives: December, 2008

For those of you who haven’t yet gone paperless, part two of our digital textbook for North Carolina history is now available in PDF format. Check the sidebar of any page of the edition for a link. (A PDF is also available for our first module, on precolonial North Carolina.)

All the content of the web edition is available in the PDF, and it’s nicely formatted for printing. Of course, you’ll lose a lot of functionality — mouseover comments and built-in glossary, big photos, zoomable maps, video and animations don’t work on paper. And it’s 500 pages, so you will not want to print this lightly. But it’s great when you need a primary source or an article for reference, as a handout, or for an in-depth student activity.

LEARN NC has just published a beta version of an online textbook for instruction in Mandarin Chinese. It is designed to accompany an introductory-level high school language course and is based on the online course developed by LEARN NC, funded by a Foreign Language Assistance Program grant from the U.S. Government, sponsored by NCDPI, and offered by the North Carolina Virtual Public School. It includes an introductory section about the structure of the Chinese language and pinyin; fifteen video-based lessons; extensive notes on language, grammar, and culture; and more than 400 vocabulary words, each with an audio pronunciation guide.

The textbook is undergoing further review, but is now available as a public beta. Please send us any comments you have, and in particular any errors or inconsistencies you may find! Your comments will help us improve not only this edition but further online textbooks for Mandarin 2, 3, and 4, as well as planned textbooks for additional languages.

We’ve recently published eight videos and four lesson plans that promote understanding of the unique linguistic features of North Carolina. The videos — excerpts from documentaries produced by North Carolina State University’s North Carolina Language and Life program — provide intriguing glimpses into the vocabulary and linguistic patterns of regional and cultural groups across the state. The lesson plans, by Hannah Askin, have been adapted from the Voices of North Carolina dialect awareness curriculum, a project of NC State linguistics professors Dr. Walt Wolfram and Dr. Jeffrey Reaser.

The videos are:

• African American English
• The Cherokee Language
• Dialect in Southern cities
• Lumbee English 1
• Lumbee English 2
• Mountain Talk
• Outer Banks English
• Spanish and English in the American South

The lesson plans, which incorporate video-viewing activities, are:

• African American English
• Language Change in North Carolina Cities
• Outer Banks English
• Spanish and Hispanic English in North Carolina

Want to spruce up your computer screen? We’ve just created some great new LEARN NC desktop backgrounds which will look snazzy on your classroom computer or your personal system. The wallpapers come in four different screen resolutions so you can download the size that’s best for your computer:

Standard

• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1280 x 1024

Widescreen

• 1680 x 1050

Now that we’ve sparked your curiosity, click here to check them out and start downloading!

Bill Ferris and Emily Jack of LEARN NC will address middle and high school teachers in Wake County on Tuesday, December 9. During three 45-minute sessions, they will discuss what’s new, different, and useful on the LEARN NC website, including the digital textbook of North Carolina history, the multimedia library, online professional development, and Instructify.

We’ve published two new interactive guides that walk students through the process of thinking like a historian.  Each guide models an approach to a primary source through commentary by historian Dr. Kathryn Walbert.  The guides step through layers of questions, beginning with the most basic details of the documents’ creation and culminating in questions that invite higher-level thinking and analysis.

“Reading primary sources: Slave narratives” presents the narrative of Abner Jordan, who was born into slavery at Stagville Plantation in Durham County, NC.

“Reading primary sources: Letters” presents two letters written by John Adams to his wife Abigail on the eve of the new nation’s birth.

The guides are part of a series exploring historical sources, which also includes “Reading primary sources: Newspaper editorials” and “Reading primary sources: Newspaper advertisements.”

In the New York Times this week there was an article about how scientists are rethinking their picture of the early Earth. Basically, the story is this: The earliest period of the Earth’s development, some four billion years ago, is called the Hadean period, after Hades, the underworld of Greek myth. Scientists gave it that name because the Earth at that time was thought to be hot, dry, heavily volcanic, and lifeless. Now, though, some geologists are arguing that the Earth then may have had oceans, plate tectonics, and extremely simple life forms very soon after the planet formed. You may only be interested in the details if you’re an earth science teacher, but the article offers a fascinating look into the process of science, which often is as interesting as the discoveries themselves.

If you want to brush up on your geologic history (or just get a quick reference), we can help. For the digital textbook we’re developing, we produced an “at a glance” guide to the natural history of North Carolina, with some information about how scientists know this stuff (or think they know it). You can find information like this elsewhere (notably from Wikipedia) but our version is, where possible, specific to North Carolina, and might be used in a variety of settings.