Archives: February, 2009

Are you a fan of LEARN NC? Now you can show your support by becoming a fan of LEARN NC on Facebook. The LEARN NC page contains resources to help you stay connected including pictures, the LEARN NC and Instructify blogs, as well as a wall for fans to communicate with one another.

Sign into your Facebook account and visit the page today.

Part 3 of our “digital textbook” for North Carolina history, on the era of the American Revolution, is now published. It combines primary sources with articles from a variety of perspectives, maps, photographs, slideshows, and video to tell the many stories of Revolutionary North Carolina:

• the uprisings of Regulators, backcountry farmers angry with unfair taxes, illegal fees, and corrupt officials
• the responses of North Carolinians and other colonists to Great Britain’s taxes and trade regulations
• the path from resistance to armed revolution
• the bloody civil war in the Carolina backcountry
• the creation of independent governments for North Carolina and the United States

As with the previous modules of the digital textbook, we’ve relied primarily on materials already digitized by libraries and museums, but we’ve added newly digitized primary sources and original photographs and video. You can read famous documents such as the Halifax Resolves as well as less famous documents such as diaries of harassed Moravians and a petition from Patriot women asking leniency for families of Loyalists. Or, if you’re a visual learner (wink, nudge), you can go straight for the video of reenactors firing an eighteenth-century cannon. It’s your Revolution, and it’s all in one place.

You can browse other modules and search our entire collection of resources for teaching and learning about North Carolina history at the newly redesigned digital textbook home page. And hang onto your tricornes, because six more modules (including some 400 pages of primary and secondary sources) are coming this spring and summer.

We’re in the process of overhauling our education reference collection. The collection began as a series of brief entries explaining terms used in education; those entries are now being developed into longer reference articles. Updated entries are detailed, research-based articles that explore the history and theory of an educational concept and incorporate concrete suggestions for the classroom. Recently published articles include:

• Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Code-switching
• Cooperative Learning
• Critical Literacy
• Culturally Relevant Teaching
• Digital Game-based Learning
• Experiential Education
• Jigsaw
• Modeling
• Montessori
• Paideia
• Project-based Learning
• Socratic Method
• Team Teaching

Stay tuned to the “Best Practices” area on the home page; we’re updating this collection frequently.

LEARN NC will have an exhibit at the 10th annual MEGA Showcase on Wednesday, May 6. The showcase lasts from 3:30 - 5:45 p.m. at the Friday Institute in Raleigh. Middle-school students and teachers from around North Carolina have volunteered to exhibit their multimedia and web projects. Technology renewal credits are available for teachers who participate.

As we all know, first-year teaching can be stressful. At LEARN NC, we can help alleviate the stress with our online course Beginning Teacher Success, designed to help new teachers develop their skills. Previously, the course was only offered through a LEARN NC instructor, but now if you’ve completed LEARN NC Moodle Training, you can teach the course at your school free of charge!

The goal of the course is for beginning teachers to explore what current educational research says, learn about best practices, implement effective strategies and tips, and become the best they can be in their new career. Now you can impart this valuable knowledge to new teachers in your school.

Click here for more information, including the course syllabus.