Archives: New on the website

Just in time for the start of spring, we’ve published a new slideshow of high-resolution, close-up photographs that show the life cycle of the eastern black swallowtail butterfly. These amazing photographs by Kathryn Walbert show the egg, the emerging larva, the different instars or stages of growth of the larva, the larva becoming a chrysalis, and the newly emerged butterfly drying its wings. The accompanying captions tell you what’s going on at each stage. (And special thanks to Richard Stickney, the Butterfly Curator at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science in Durham, for checking our facts!)

Part 3 of our “digital textbook” for North Carolina history, on the era of the American Revolution, is now published. It combines primary sources with articles from a variety of perspectives, maps, photographs, slideshows, and video to tell the many stories of Revolutionary North Carolina:

• the uprisings of Regulators, backcountry farmers angry with unfair taxes, illegal fees, and corrupt officials
• the responses of North Carolinians and other colonists to Great Britain’s taxes and trade regulations
• the path from resistance to armed revolution
• the bloody civil war in the Carolina backcountry
• the creation of independent governments for North Carolina and the United States

As with the previous modules of the digital textbook, we’ve relied primarily on materials already digitized by libraries and museums, but we’ve added newly digitized primary sources and original photographs and video. You can read famous documents such as the Halifax Resolves as well as less famous documents such as diaries of harassed Moravians and a petition from Patriot women asking leniency for families of Loyalists. Or, if you’re a visual learner (wink, nudge), you can go straight for the video of reenactors firing an eighteenth-century cannon. It’s your Revolution, and it’s all in one place.

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. And hang onto your tricornes, because six more modules (including some 400 pages of primary and secondary sources) are coming this spring and summer.

We’re in the process of overhauling our education reference collection. The collection began as a series of brief entries explaining terms used in education; those entries are now being developed into longer reference articles. Updated entries are detailed, research-based articles that explore the history and theory of an educational concept and incorporate concrete suggestions for the classroom. Recently published articles include:

• Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Code-switching
• Cooperative Learning
• Critical Literacy
• Culturally Relevant Teaching
• Digital Game-based Learning
• Experiential Education
• Jigsaw
• Modeling
• Montessori
• Paideia
• Project-based Learning
• Socratic Method
• Team Teaching

Stay tuned to the “Best Practices” area on the home page; we’re updating this collection frequently.

As we promised back in the fall, we’ve added more lesson plans that incorporate multimedia from around the world. The latest batch includes lessons that teach science, social studies, English language arts, and visual arts, exploring countries including Colombia, India, Malawi, Mexico, and Nepal.

Don’t miss the following lesson plans:

• Of earth, water, and fire: World pottery traditions, which helps students learn about pottery traditions from around the world through photo analysis. Students discuss how pottery traditions from different parts of the globe are similar to and different from one another. (grades 6-8)
• Motor car and galimoto: An intercultural lesson in pragmatism, creativity, and perseverance, in which students read about a young boy in Malawi, Africa, and his quest to gather wire in order to make a toy car. Students discuss the literary elements of the book, study the language used, and complete their own quests to gather wire and create their own galimotos. (grade 3)
• The mountains of Nepal: Scientific investigations, a science plan in which students discuss ecosystems and biodiversity, conduct research about the mountains of Nepal, and use photos of Nepal to create a journal about a mountain trek. (grade 5)
• Magic carpet ride: Exploring carpet weaving in India, in which students analyze photographs to learn about the Indian tradition of carpet weaving. (grade 7)

Through a partnership with the UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas, we’ve just published The Changing Face of Mexico, a collection of articles, activities, and photographs exploring Mexican culture, past and present.

You’ll explore four Mexican celebrations: The Day of the Dead, Mexican Independence Day (16 de Septiembre), the Quinceañera, and the equinox at the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá. Each section includes historical perspectives, classroom activities, recipes, and slideshows, and a list of references is provided for further reading.

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.”