Archives: March, 2010

As LEARN NC has grown, we’ve sometimes had trouble keeping up with the demand for customer service. To fix this, you can now call the LEARN NC Help Desk any time, day or night, Monday through Sunday at 919-962-HELP (4357) for all your technical assistance needs. You may also email us at helpdesk@learnnc.org. A real person is always ready to diagnose your problem and provide the appropriate response.

LEARN NC online courses provide the flexibility to work on a course when it’s most convenient to you, whether that’s during school hours or at home in your pajamas. If you run into a technical issue, waiting until business hours isn’t always an option. Whatever day or time you’re reading this, know that help is available to you right now.

Bobby Hobgood will present at the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina Spring Workshops in Asheville, N.C. on Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Classroom assessment by the minute: Teaching students to monitor their own learning from no-tech to high-tech

The pressure of covering the curriculum while preparing for EOCs or EOGs often prevents us from integrating formative assessment strategies that lead to higher quality learning. The secret to overcoming those external pressures lies in how we think about assessment opportunities minute-by-minute. During this interactive session, we will rethink the roles of teacher and student as we explore easy-to-use strategies for preparing students to monitor their own learning. Participants will leave with simple strategies to help their students see ongoing, formative assessment as an essential learning tool for learning. Examples range from no-tech to high-tech strategies for engaging students while gathering feedback.

We previously reported on server maintenance scheduled for Saturday and Sunday March 13-14. We’re happy to say that this outage has been canceled, as the necessary maintenance was accomplished without necessitating any server down time. As such, users should experience no outages on the LEARN NC website, Instructify, or online courses offered on our Moodle servers.

Beginning March 13, six cultural institutions in rural parts of North Carolina will host a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition, New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music, is organized and presented by the North Carolina Humanities Council, and is free and open to the public.

New Harmonies provides a unique field trip opportunity for students and teachers all over the state, who will have access to a Smithsonian Institution exhibit at their own local museums or libraries. Students will have a rare opportunity to learn about the rich, diverse musical heritage of North Carolina and the United States by seeing artifacts and hearing music in person.

The exhibition tells a musical story with interactive kiosks devoted to American music genres such as blues, country western, folk, and gospel music. Kiosks display vintage sheet music, photographs, program bills, and instruments such as dulcimers and banjos, the diddley bow and drums. A listening station provides an opportunity to experience music firsthand. Each host site will develop programming and activities to complement the exhibit — lectures, films, and performances, oral histories, and photo essays about home-grown musicians and local musical traditions.

New Harmonies will appear in North Carolina at the following locations and dates:

• Mount Airy: Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, March 13 – April 24
• Warrenton: Warren County Memorial Library, May 1 – June 12
• Elizabeth City: Museum of the Albemarle, June 19 – August 1
• Goldsboro: Arts Council of Wayne County, August 7 – September 18
• Mars Hill: Rural Life Museum at the Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies, Mars Hill College, September 25 – November 6
• Shelby: Don Gibson Theatre, November 13 – December 29

Contact the North Carolina Humanities Council or the American Roots location near you for more information and to find out about related educational programs and activities.

In designing our digital textbook for North Carolina history, we didn’t make special modules or chapters on women’s history, because we don’t see women’s history as a special topic or something you can tack on to your curriculum. Women are half the population. Always have been. So you’ll find primary sources by and about women throughout every section of the textbook.

As with any other topic, though, you can quickly find pages that explicitly deal with women and women’s issues. Go to the front page of the textbook collection, then do one of two things:

• In the search form, select women from the theme menu, and click search.
• Click women in the tag cloud at the bottom of the page.

Both will take you to a listing of all our content, multimedia, and lesson plans about women in North Carolina history. Want to narrow it down? Click find only text at the top of the page to get just text-based resources.

Nearly all of that content can be used to study broader U.S. history as well.

You can also find a wide range of women’s history resources for all grade levels — lesson plans, websites, and student readings — in our women’s history collection guide.

March is STEM month at LEARN NC. To celebrate, we’ve lowered the tuition for two of our online courses, Elementary Science Learning and Middle Grades Science Learning, to only $75. These courses are great opportunities to inexpensively earn CEU credit and acquire skills that can make a difference in your classroom. Course details are below.

Elementary Science Learning – begins March 22
Science is fundamentally about the process of making sense of phenomena in the natural and social world. In this course you will think about the scientific process and how it applies to teaching science in the elementary classroom.

Middle Grades Science Learning – begins March 22
This course intends to engage teachers in investigations of Science, the Nature of Science, and Practices that scientists use to make sense of phenomena in the world. Each of these things are at the heart of the Nature of Science and Inquiry Strands of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study.

LEARN NC staff members will give several presentations at the North Carolina Technology in Education Society Conference, held March 3-5 at the Convention Center in Raleigh. A summary of presentations is below.

Pre-conference workshops

Classroom assessment by the minute: Teaching students to monitor their own learning from no-tech to high-tech

Bobby Hobgood

Wednesday, March 4, 9:00 – 12:00 and 1:00 – 4:00, Raleigh Marriott Alumni Board Room

The pressure of covering the curriculum while preparing for EOCs or EOGs often prevents us from integrating formative assessment strategies that lead to higher quality learning. The secret to overcoming those external pressures lies in how we think about assessment opportunities minute-by-minute. During this interactive session, we will rethink the roles of teacher and student as we explore easy-to-use strategies for preparing students to monitor their own learning. Participants will leave with simple strategies to help their students see ongoing, formative assessment as an essential learning tool for learning. Examples range from no-tech to high-tech strategies for engaging students while gathering feedback.

Concurrent sessions

School Improvement Through Online Professional Development

Ross White, Stephen Greene, and Verna Lalbeharie

Thursday, March 4, 10:45 – 11:45

Explore the latest research on online professional development from e-Learning for Educators, and learn strategies for integrating quality online learning into your school’s professional development plan. We’ll discuss funding strategies, standards alignment, and opportunities from a wide array of online professional development providers in North Carolina.

Beyond Blended Learning: Reaching every student

Bobby Hobgood

Thursday, March 4, 10:45 – 11:45, Room 302a

Learning in the Knowledge Age takes place in a broader range of settings than we knew as students. This session explores the concept of blended learning and how it merges traditional and contemporary pedagogies to meet the needs of today’s learners. Discover how Blended Learning is simply good teaching.

Discovering great online resources for teaching

Bill Ferris and Jason Don Forsythe

Thursday, March 4, 10:45 – 11:45, Room 302b

Bring your laptop and come play with the latest free online teaching tools. The folks behind LEARN NC’s Instructify blog will guide you show you the latest educational games, animation programs, and time savers, as well as cover how you can use them in class.

Adventures in Mapping

David Walbert and Emily Jack

Thursday, March 4, 10:45 – 11:45, Room 306a

Technology has given educators access to maps and mapping tools undreamed of a generation ago. But is more — and higher-tech — better? In this session we’ll look at some of the tools and types of maps available and how teachers can make best use of them in the classroom.

Project-based learning 3.0: Facilitating student collaboration and building teachers’ professional learning networks with free digital tools and LEARN NC

Melissa Thibault and Lesley Richardson

Thursday, March 4, 3:30 – 4:30, Room 301a

Teaching, learning and assessing with technology mediated tools and Internet-based resources is not just for students. To be successful, teachers also need to collaborate! Integrate new information literacy skills and discover resources that will help you broaden your network and model possibilities for bringing new perspectives, and solve problems with project-based learning.

Online Instructional Design: Lessons Learned from COLT

Ross White

Thursday, March 4, 4:45 – 5:45, Room 302c

As courses move to online and blended formats, designing instruction for web-based and asynchronous presentation is a skill teachers will need. LEARN NC staff will discuss the basics of sound instructional design for the online environment, stepping you through some of the lessons learned in the Carolina Online Teacher program.

Digital Natives 3.0: Where assumption meets reality

Dan Kelo and Bobby Hobgood

Friday, March 5, 9:15 – 10:15, 302b

In this session we will challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about the ways in which digital natives use technologies; assessing students’ actual strengths and weaknesses by means of a formative assessment instrument to target areas that require more concentrated development, thus increasing the overall effectiveness of your pedagogical strategies.

Our latest teacher profile features Kishia Moore, a first-grade teacher at Greenlee Primary School. The article “Seeing, wondering, theorizing, learning: Inquiry-based instruction with Kishia Moore” is our sixth in a series spotlighting teachers who use inventive instructional techniques.

This article explains Ms. Moore’s use of inquiry-based instruction, a teaching technique rooted in questioning — both students’ questions about the material under investigation and the interrogation of students by teachers to elicit understanding.

Ms. Moore, a member of the 2011 cohort of the Kenan Fellows Program for Curriculum and Leadership Development, favors this challenging technique because it activates within her students what is known as metacognition, or knowing about knowing. Says Ms. Moore, “It helps even the youngest students gain active control over the process of thinking, so they learn not only the current lesson, but also how to learn, which will serve them well throughout their lives.”

Our goal for the series is to allow outstanding teachers to present, in their own words, successful instructional practices for the benefit of not only other teachers but also policy-makers, school administrators, and education researchers. Previous entries in the series include:

• Staging history: Charter School Teacher of the Year John Hall brings lessons to life
• Using technology to teach foreign languages: Teacher of the Year Jessica Garner shares secrets
• Wall-to-wall project-based learning: A conversation with biology teacher Kelley Yonce
• Traveling the world, virtually: Project-based learning in elementary school
• Challenge-based learning: José Garcia’s innovative approach to student inquiry