Archives: January, 2010

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.

The archive of LEARN NC’s fall 2009 interactive conference, held October 1, 2009, is now available — Adobe Connect sessions, handouts, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

January 2010 director’s message:

As promised, we’ve added the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards search to the LEARN NC website. You can find it on the left-hand menu of the LEARN NC website under the “Standards” heading.

I’ve picked up on a lot of anxiety from teachers about how their performance will be evaluated from now on as a result of these standards. With this addition to the website, they can find professional development and classroom resources that will help them address each of these new criteria.

Right now, searching according to the standards returns only our online professional development courses. We’re working on making our Best Practices and instructional models searchable too, and we expect this work to be completed by the start of the 2010-2011 school year.

We tried to make this new feature as simple as possible, borrowing the format of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study search tool you’re already used to. If you want to find a resource aligned to, say, Standard 4: Teachers facilitate learning for their students, just click on the Standard 4 link. The standard is now broken down by each sub-point. When you find the area you’re looking for, click the “Find related resources” link. You’ll see a list of everything we have that addresses that standard. It’s easy enough that it will probably take you longer to read this paragraph than to learn how to use it.

Teachers are busy, overworked and stressed-out. We made our courses searchable according to the Professional Teacher Standards as a way to make teachers’ lives a little easier. Of course, we rely on you to tell us whether we’re succeeding. If you know of a way we can make this feature even more useful to you, please say so in the comments, or feel free to contact me personally.

Sincerely,
Melissa Thibault
Executive Director

LEARN NC is proud to be a partner with the North Carolina Distance Learning Association. Bobby Hobgood, Director of Research and Development in Online Curriculum and Instruction, serves as the conference chair for NCDLA. Through his involvement, NCDLA has reached out to the K-12 community to create a K-20 organization. LEARN has developed and supported the NCDLA website and last year’s Virtual Conference which included 655 registrants from around the U.S.

This year, NCDLA offers a series of webinars and a Blended Conference on distance education.  For the price of the $25 membership, educators can participate in four webinars and the eight webinars that comprise the virtual component of the Blended Conference. The face-to-face component of the Blended Conference will take place in New Bern, North Carolina. on April 8-9, 2010. Members receive a reduced rate to attend that event. For more details on how you can become a member and supplement your professional development, see http://www.usdla-nc.org

LEARN NC has several online professional development courses open for enrollment this semester. Please review a PDF version of the LEARN NC Online Professional Development Catalog for Spring 2010. This easily shareable document contains information about courses that start in the coming months, and includes in-depth information about initiatives like LEARN NC’s Carolina OnLine Teacher Program.

What’s new

As you peruse the catalog, you’ll notice that in each course description you can quickly see which of the new North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards a particular course addresses. For example, a quick glance at The Civil Rights Movement in Context reveals that it addresses Standard III: Teachers know the content they teach, Standard IV: Teachers facilitate learning for their students, and Standard V: Teachers reflect on their practice. For teachers, this removes the confusion about how they can align their development to the new state standards.

To register for LEARN NC professional development courses, please visit the Open for Enrollment page. For detailed descriptions of course offerings, please look over the course catalog for Spring 2010. As teachers strive to make sense of the new state standards, LEARN NC online professional development can help guide the way.

LEARN NC Online Professional Development Catalog – Spring 2010