Archives: New on the website

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!

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.”

We’ve published a number of best practices articles lately about teaching students from different cultural backgrounds. The first three are part of an initiative to overhaul our education reference; they’re detailed, research-based articles that begin with the history and theory of an idea and conclude with a variety of specific suggestions for the classroom:

• critical literacy
• culturally relevant teaching
• code-switching

Two more recent articles address specifically the needs of immigrant students from Mexico:

• Bridging the differences: Cultural background of Mexican students entering U.S. schools
• The middle school challenge for English language learners of Mexican origin

We’ve been busily adding to our collection of lesson plans for teaching about world cultures using multimedia. Incorporating audio recordings and photographs from countries around the world, the lesson plans cover a variety of curriculum areas, grade levels, and topics. Recent highlights include:

• To Market, To Market: Photograph Analysis, which encourages students to analyze photos of markets in Bali, Ecuador, India, Mexico, and Vietnam in order to understand the cultural significance of markets and the elements that unify geographically distant locations.
• Bounce Into Rubber: Natural Latex from Thailand, a science plan in which students examine various plant species to determine whether any produce natural latex, and explore the rubber production process in Thailand through photos and audio recordings.
• Bullfighting in Colombia, in which students students study the history of bullfighting in Spain and Colombia as an example of how cultural traditions can be transferred from one place to another.

Still more of these are on the way, so stay tuned. And if you like what you see, let us know!

Bring the elections into your classroom with LEARN NC’s 2008 election guide. The guide contains tools and lessons that cover elections at the national, state, and local levels. Resources include information about the electoral process, political parties, candidates, issues, news, and more. Regardless of what grade level or subject area you teach, you’ll find suggestions for making the issues of the 2008 elections a part of your curriculum.

We’ll add more resources in the coming days, including information about local and judicial elections. If you have ideas or suggestions for resources we can add or areas on which you’d like us to focus, please email Emily Jack, Associate Editor.

LEARN NC has recently published a series of CareerStart lesson plans for grade seven. The lessons help teachers draw connections between middle-school students’ future careers and core curriculum in English language arts, math, science, and social studies.

CareerStart is a schools and community capacity-building strategy that attempts to positively influence the educational trajectory for all students, but especially those at higher risk for school failure. CareerStart was developed as a partnership among the Schools of Education and Social Work at UNC - Chapel Hill, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school district, and the Piedmont Triad Council of Government.

Grade six CareerStart lesson plans are also available, and lesson plans for grade eight are coming soon.

Part 2 of our digital textbook for North Carolina history is now available! Called Grand visions, rough realities: The development of colonial North Carolina, it contains 67 pages of primary sources and background reading, plus guides for using the kinds of primary sources provided. In developing it, we’ve worked with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, the North Carolina Museum of History, UNC Libraries, Fort Dobbs State Historic Site, the North Carolina Literary Review, and other partners. Also included in this module are interactive maps built on Google maps technology, video animations, “zoomable” maps and illustrations, and more than 100 other photographs, paintings, illustrations, and maps.

About the digital textbook

LEARN NC’s “digital textbook” for 8th-grade North Carolina history provides a new model for teaching and learning. It makes primary sources central to the learning experience, using them to tell the stories of the past rather than merely illustrating it. Special web-based tools help students learn to read those sources and ask good questions of them. And because it’s on the web, this textbook relies on multimedia whenever possible to supplement or even replace text.

We’re publishing the online textbook in several parts, or “modules.” Part 1, Two worlds: Prehistory, contact, and the Lost Colony, was published last spring and includes an educator’s guide with lesson plans. Part 3, on the Revolutionary period, will be published this fall — we hope, in time for eighth-grade teachers to use the resources when they get to that part of the curriculum. We’re also working on lesson plans and a full educator’s guide for the colonial period. The remaining modules will roll out in 2009.

You can learn more about the digital textbook project from this flyer (PDF, 95KB).

Highlights

Highlights from the colonial module include:

• A collection of wills and probate inventories with process guides for students let them explore daily life and eighteenth-century families.
• Two interactive tools for exploring maps — Google maps and eighteenth-century maps — let students explore travel and transportation then and now.
• Primary sources and background reading about West Africa and the slave trade help students understand the origins of African American culture.
• Science integration! Video animation shows why North Carolina’s coast gets so many hurricanes, and a discussion of the longleaf pine forests combines economic and environmental history with ecology.

More to come!

A few more pieces of colonial content are planned for fall 2008. Still to come: an interactive map of one of North Carolina’s first towns, slideshows of colonial towns and homes, and video demonstrations of colonial life.

Comments?

As we develop future modules and refine the content we’ve already published, we need your help! If you use any part of the digital textbook in your classroom, please contact us to tell us how you’re using it, how your students respond, and what we can do to improve the textbook.