Archives: March, 2010

LEARN NC provides relevant, inclusive, research-based online professional development for teachers. According to end-of-course surveys, course participants overwhelmingly felt LEARN NC online courses were relevant to their jobs, and made them feel like they were part of a learning community.

What does that mean? Several research studies have linked effective professional development with student achievement. If training directly relates to a teacher’s subject and focuses on how students learn, it translates into better student performance.

Download our new flyer to learn how LEARN NC professional development can make a difference in your teaching. To find a course for you, please visit our Open for Enrollment page.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education has published a feature article about LEARN NC’s North Carolina Digital History. The piece covers the vision and scope of the project, and the extensive planning and effort that went into creating it. It also explores the possibility of future digital texts. From the article:

Having demonstrated the feasibility of creating a digital textbook, LEARN NC is pursuing funding for additional, similar projects. Grants are a possibility, says [LEARN NC Editorial and Web Director Dr. David] Walbert, and state officials have shown interest. “We’re not going to throw out all of our print textbooks tomorrow, and I’m not interested in going digital just for the sake of going digital,” he concludes. “But the technology allows us to make something better than a print textbook, and we should invest in what works best.”

Read the whole article at School of Education website. North Carolina Digital History is now available in its entirety.

Last October, LEARN NC hosted its first hybrid online/face-to-face conference. It was a terrific event, and we’ve had other educators ask how we pulled it off. To answer that question (and to make sure we ourselves wouldn’t forget) we’ve published a white paper, “Hosting a hybrid online conference.” It covers the logistics, technical specifications, rehearsal schedule, and lessons learned from conducting a conference with both online and face-to-face components. If you’d like to pass it along to someone in your school or district, it’s also available as a shareable, printable PDF.

Now, a disclaimer. This document is not intended as the only way of doing things, nor necessarily even the best way. This is how we put on a hybrid online conference given the personnel and technical constraints unique to LEARN NC, so your results may vary depending on your own tech and staff capabilities. We hope, however, that by recording this process, we have demystified it so that other organizations may stage successful online events of their own.

Registration is open for three professional development workshops developed by the North Carolina Mathematics and Science Education Network. These workshops are designed to deepen participants’ science content knowledge and to strengthen their ability to encourage inquiry. Participants will examine misconceptions, reflect together on instructional strategies designed to engage young students.

Each session lasts nine days (five days in the summer and four days during the 2010-2011 school year) and focuses on the major science themes in the North Carolina Standard Course of Study for its particular grade levels. These sessions will also emphasize the authentic integration of literacy, mathematics, and technology.

SITE: K-2 Science

June 21 – 25, 2010 plus four days to be scheduled during the 2010-2011 school year, 8:30 – 4:00 daily at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham, NC.

• Earth Systems (weather features, Earth materials, and solar energy)
• Force and Matter (properties of matter, energy, properties of force)
• Living Organisms (needs of organisms, cycles of life, variety of organisms)

SITE: 3-5 Science

June 21 – 25, 2010 (NCSSM) plus four days to be scheduled during the 2010-2011 school year, 8:30 – 4:00 daily at the North Carolina School for Science and Math in Durham, NC. Content will include:

• Rock Cycle (soil properties, composition/uses of rocks and minerals and landforms)
• Ecology (plant growth and adaptations, animal behavior and adaptations, and interdependence of plants and animals)
• Energy/Forces (light, heat, magnetism and electricity, and forces and motion)
• Weather and Climate (wind direction & speed, precipitation, cloud cover, air pressure, weather patterns, influence of geography on weather)

Assessment in science and managing science materials also will be included in this institute.

SITE: 6-8 Science

June 28 – July 2, 2010 plus four days to be scheduled during the 2010-2011 school year, 8:30 – 4:00 daily at the North Carolina School for Science and Math in Durham. Topics included in this institute are:

• Life Systems (human body, microbiology, pandemics)
• Earth Systems (hydrology, lithosphere, and population dynamics)

Assessment in science and managing science materials also will be included in this institute.
Registration information

• Registration deadline: May 1, 2010
• CEUs — for each session educators will earn 5.4 CEUs for 9 days
• Cost — $100/day ($900 total) for teachers residing on NCSSM campus or $85/day ($765 total) for commuters. Breakfast and lunch included for residents; lunch included for commuters. Four days of instruction are scheduled during the school year; teachers need substitutes to attend the two Friday/Saturday sessions at NCSSM.
• Tuition Waiver — For teachers serving in schools designated as Low Performing or Priority on the NC Report Card, grant funds will be applied and the tuition will be waived. Teachers qualifying for the grant must pay a $25 registration fee.
• Support from the grant does not cover the cost for substitutes for teachers attending instructional days during the school year.

To register, follow this link to the registration process. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis, and seats are limited.

For more information, contact Carole Stern, (stern at ncssm dot edu), (919) 416-2635.

The latest post on our special education blog discusses whether students with learning and behavior disorders can benefit from evidence-based reading interventions. The post presents specific evidence-based teaching practices based on the work of the National Reading Panel.

In the summer of 2010 the National Humanities Center will offer three free, live online professional development seminars exclusively for North Carolina high school teachers of American history and literature.

Seminar participants will each receive a $100 stipend. Registration is limited to one seminar per educator and the registration deadline is May 28, 2010. Register at the National Humanities Center website.

The seminars are conducted online through conferencing software. To participate, a teacher will need a computer with an internet connection, speakers, and a microphone. The Center will provide, for free, a headset with a built in microphone.

What Caused the Civil War?

Wednesday, June 23, 2010, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m

Seminar Leader: Dr. Edward Ayers,
President of the University of Richmond and Trustee of the National Humanities Center

Did slavery cause the Civil War? Or was it a conflict over states’ rights? Or was it the inevitable clash between an industrial society and an agrarian society? Or was it a struggle between two imperialistic powers over territorial expansion? Or was it really about slavery after all? Find out how recent scholarship answers these questions.

Religious Roots of the American Abolitionist Movement

Tuesday, June 29, 2010, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Seminar Leader: Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Associate Professor of Religion, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and National Humanities Center Fellow

Moral issues were center stage in American politics. Evangelical Christians formed an influential power bloc and voted according to their religious beliefs. They expected elected officials to do the same. Their opponents feared for secular democracy and insisted on the separation of church and state. Yesterday? No, 1850. The issue was slavery. More than such enlightened beliefs as “All men are created equal,” religious fervor fueled the abolition movement. Join us to learn how and why.

What did Reconstruction Achieve

Date to be announced, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Seminar Leader: Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and National Humanities Center Fellow

Reconstruction remains one of the most disputed periods in American history. How did it re-create the nation that collapsed in 1861? Did it solidify the North’s victory or permit the South to escape defeat? Did it resolve the issues that caused the War or merely postpone a final reckoning?

We’ve published the eleventh and final module of our digital textbook for North Carolina history, covering the period since 1975. Topics include the state’s increasing diversity, environmental protection and other political issues, the changing economy, and a look at Hurricane Floyd and its impact.

This concludes the textbook — but nothing on the Web is ever really finished! We’ll continue to add resources as we find them, and we’ll be publishing an expanded educator’s guide later this spring.

If your school is planning to submit an application for the LEARN NC Invest in Teachers Award to help stretch your professional development budget, it pays to get advice on what the selection committee will look for. We’ve posted a list of application tips to help you out.

Among other pieces of advice, you’ll learn it pays to be specific about how the award will be implemented. You can also read case studies of two winning LEAs from 2009 and find out their strategies for applying for the award and putting it to use.

Remember, the application deadline for the Invest in Teachers Award is April 30, so you still have plenty of time to apply if you start now. One thing both of the aforementioned case studies had in common was they started the process well in advance of the deadline.

Check out the two most recent posts on our special education blog:

• The relationship between learning problems and behavior problems
• Seven strategies that promote academic and behavioral success

The posts look at the ways in which learning problems and behavior problems reinforce each other, and offer strategies to increase positive student behavior.

The sheer quantity of maps the internet makes available is great for educators, because we can easily find visual resources to accompany lessons in science and social studies. But it also presents us with a new challenge, because it’s now more important than ever that students develop map-reading skills. And those skills are more complicated than most educators realize.

A new series of articles based on my presentation at NC TIES last week looks at map skills as a kind of visual literacy, considering what maps are, how they’re made, and the higher-order thinking skills students need to move from simply decoding maps to fully comprehending them.