Archives: New on the website

This week, our Special Education blog looks at classroom management. By being proactive and consistent and by collaborating with other adults, teachers can maintain a positive classroom environment.

We’ve just published a comprehensive guide to the writing process, from pre-writing and preliminary research through formatting and publishing. The guide is presented as a series of articles that use discussion, examples, and suggested resources to help you guide students through any writing assignment.

“A Writing Process” breaks the work down into a series of manageable tasks, which can make assignments seem more approachable to reluctant writers. The articles suggest pre-writing strategies, explore the process of writing thesis statements, discuss ways of using graphic organizers to map out ideas, share resources for evaluating the credibility of online sources, and more.

A North Carolina Humanities Council’s Teachers Institute, with experts from the Cherokee and Lumbee tribes, developed this comprehensive guide to help North Carolina educators teach their students about North Carolina’s Indians and their history. The guide, “Teaching about North Carolina American Indians,” is now available on LEARN NC’s website.

The rich heritage of North Carolina’s American Indians is presented though best practice articles, webliographies of resources that can be found in print and online, and lesson plans for 4th and 8th grades that help educators teach about the Cherokee, the Lumbee, and other tribes of our state. Teachers will also find downloadable audio files on Cherokee language and folklore, along with guides to using them in the classroom. In addition, the Lumbee English is addressed through a dialect dictionary and quiz created by the renowned North Carolina State University linguist professor, Dr. Walt Wolfram.

If you missed LEARN NC’s Fall Interactive Conference on October 1, we’ve posted video archives from all the afternoon sessions. Nine sessions in total cover project-based learning; professional development; fun, free tools for the classroom; and more content designed to save you time and help you teach more effectively.

The videos also feature a replay of the ongoing live chat. This online conversation includes supplemental links, resources, and insights from LEARN NC staff members and educators from around North Carolina — and around the country.

All session archives will open in Adobe Connect. For more information about Adobe Connect software, please see the technical requirements section of the “Details for Virtual Participants” page.

LEARN NC Fall Interactive Conference 2009 — Session archives

LEARN NC’s new blog, Special Education: Telling Facts from Fiction, examines common misconceptions about students with learning and behavioral problems. The latest post extends an ongoing discussion about student-teacher ratios: What benefits do students experience with an increased student-teacher ratio? What strategies can a teacher use to achieve these same benefits given the realities of most classrooms? How can teachers encourage the success of students with special needs in inclusion classrooms?

Check out the new post, “Student-teacher ratio: Part II,” and join the conversation!

Part seven of our digital textbook for North Carolina history is now published! North Carolina in the New South covers the period from about 1870 to 1900, with topics including industrialization, changes in agriculture, Gilded Age culture, expanding opportunities, Populism, and the Wilmington Race Riot. This section also includes some early motion picture footage, along with video of junior reenactors from Duke Homestead State Historic Site. (More video on growing, harvesting, and selling tobacco is coming soon.) There are also excerpts from oral history interviews with men and women who grew up at the end of the nineteenth century. And for the quantitatively inclined, there are a couple of activities that integrate mathematics by asking students to analyze census and economic data.

The remaining four parts of the textbook, covering the twentieth century, will be published in the coming months. And remember that you can search or browse the entire textbook and all its primary sources and media from the cover page.

LEARN NC has published Mandarin Chinese II — the second in a series of digital textbooks for Mandarin Chinese courses. Like the textbook for Mandarin Chinese I, which was published in December 2008, it incorporates audio and video with instruction in grammar, language, and culture.

Mandarin Chinese II helps learners build on the skills they learned in Mandarin I. In addition to learning more complex grammar rules and sentence patterns — including how to use past and future tenses — the textbook focuses on differences in formal and informal language. It also includes lessons about Chinese New Year and visiting China in order to further students’ knowledge of Chinese culture.

The Mandarin textbooks are designed to accompany online language courses in Mandarin sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, developed by LEARN NC, and hosted by the North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS). The courses are funded by a Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant, an A.P. incentive grant, and a grant from the North Carolina General Assembly, and are offered alongside other online courses in critical languages like Arabic and Japanese. The availability of the digital textbooks on LEARN NC makes it easy for students to review what they have learned, or perhaps engage in self-study. Classroom teachers also benefit from the published materials, using them as supplements to existing curriculum and differentiating instruction with downloadable audio and video.

Here’s a reminder that our digital textbook for North Carolina history will be ready for classroom use this year! By the first of September, more than five hundred pages of primary sources, background readings, and multimedia will be available on our website — organized by time period and searchable by topic, type of resource, and even by county. If you haven’t seen these resources, check them out today!

• Part 5, Antebellum North Carolina, was published in July.
• North Carolina in the Civil War and North Carolina in the New South will be published in August.
• Part 8, covering the early twentieth century, will be available in early September, and the remaining three modules will be published later this fall.

Part 4 of our “digital textbook” for North Carolina history, on the early national period (1790–1836), is now published, in a new template designed to improve readability and usability. It combines primary sources with articles from a variety of perspectives, maps, photographs, and audio recordings to tell the many stories of North Carolina in the early 19th century:

• the establishment of a new capital, the growth of political parties, and the new state’s conflicts with its neighbors
• the side-by-side development of agriculture and slavery
• the Second Great Awakening or “Great Revival” and its impact on society
• North Carolina’s stagnation as the “Rip Van Winkle state” and the efforts of reformers
• education and the experiences of students
• the North Carolina Gold Rush
• transportation and the need for internal improvements
• North Carolina’s role in national events
• the reactions in North Carolina to Nat Turner’s Rebellion
• the Cherokee, Indian removal, and the Trail of Tears
• the success of reformers in the 1830s

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. The entire textbook will be ready to teach in the 2009-10 school year, so if you’re planning to teach 8th-grade history, 4th- or 5th-grade social studies, or high school U.S. history, you’ll have the resources when you need them. Five more modules will be available by the end of the summer, and the rest will be published this fall.

LEARN NC is thrilled to share the story of a local adventurer’s summit of Mount Everest through a newly published slideshow, Journey to the Top of the World: Climbing Mount Everest.

In the spring of 2008, Ciprian “Chip” Popoviciu, an engineer at Cisco Systems in Research Triangle Park, headed off to Nepal to climb the world’s highest mountain. He partnered with Martin GT Magnet Middle School in Raleigh to make the journey an interactive one for the students, sharing photos and firsthand accounts of the expedition’s successes and dangers as he climbed. This slideshow tells the story of Chip’s attempt to climb Mount Everest in photos, video, and text, including excerpts from his journal.