Archives: New on the website

Bigger than your students think. Big enough to hold the United States, China, India, Japan, and much of Europe — and you can see it in a fascinating new map of the continent.

Creator Kai Krause explains:

In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as “immappacy,” meaning insufficient geographical knowledge.

A survey of random American schoolkids let them guess the population and land area of their country. Not entirely unexpected, but still rather unsettling, the majority chose “1-2 billion” and “largest in the world,” respectively.

Even with Asian and European college students, geographical estimates were often off by factors of 2-3. This is partly due to the highly distorted nature of the predominantly used mapping projections (such as Mercator).

A particularly extreme example is the worldwide misjudgment of the true size of Africa. This single image tries to embody the massive scale, which is larger than the USA, China, India, Japan, and all of Europe … combined!

The map is available under a Creative Commons license, and it’s now available through LEARN NC as well.

(Hat tip: Good magazine.)

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve published the second article in our year-long series about differentiated instruction, “Deaf Learners and Successful Cognitive Achievement.” Author David Martin, Ph.D., is a prolific author and dean emeritus at Gallaudet University, the world’s only university for deaf persons. In the article, Dr. Martin asserts that, under appropriate conditions, deaf students can succeed in inclusive settings. He includes a list of ideal instructional conditions for deaf students in the inclusive classroom.

Video

The article includes a series of videos featuring interviews with Dr. Mary V. Compton, a professor in special education at UNC-Greensboro; Kathy Metzer, teacher of the deaf at Monticello Brown Summit Elementary; and Martha Overman, interpreter at Monticello Brown Summit. Interview excerpts paired with classroom footage provide insight and practical suggestions for educators teaching deaf students in inclusive classrooms.

Web conference

On October 25, we’ll host a web conference featuring Dr. David Martin, Dr. Mary V. Compton, and teacher of the deaf Kathy Metzer. Registration is free. For more information on this and other web conferences in this series, see the differentiation web conferences page.

Archived web conference

Our September 27 web conference on creating tiered assignments was a great success! Author and educational consultant Linda Robinson and veteran teacher Anne Hawkins shared their experiences and suggestions for implementing this strategy equitably. If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch the archived session.

Stay in the loop

From time to time throughout the school year, we’ll send email updates about this series to interested educators. If you’d like to receive these emails, please contact Lesley Richardson.

Last year LEARN NC ran a blog called Special education: Telling facts from fiction, in which our Pittleman Fellow, Kris Zorigian, considered common “myths” about special education and offered strategies for classroom teachers. As part of our continuing work on differentiated instruction, we’re adapting and expanding those blog posts into articles for the LEARN NC website. The first article, “Social skills,” was published today. Look for more in the coming weeks.

We’ve published the first article in our year-long series about differentiated instruction. In “Tiering to Avoid Tears: Developing Assignments That Address All Learners’ Needs,” author Linda Robinson presents an approach to differentiated instruction in which teachers create tiered assignments for three groups of students: 1) students who are not yet ready for that grade level’s instruction, 2) students who are just ready, and 3) students who are ready to go beyond. The article includes step-by-step instructions and a list of ten criteria by which to modify assignments.

Web conference

On September 27, we’ll host a web conference featuring the author of this article and a master teacher from North Carolina. Registration is free, but limited seats are available, so we encourage you to sign up early. For more information on this and other web conferences in this series, see the differentiation web conferences page.

Stay in the loop

From time to time throughout the school year, we’ll send email updates about this series to interested educators. If you’d like to receive these emails, please contact Lesley Richardson.

We’ve just published an article about blended learning in our education reference. It explains the characteristics, history, features, and benefits of this teaching and learning method. Here’s an excerpt:

In contrast to teacher-centered, rote-learning approaches, blended learning environments provide multiple ways to access content and to demonstrate mastery. As a result, they lend themselves more readily to differentiation of content and process. A blended approach also gives the learner the opportunity to be more responsible for his or her learning, which creates a learning situation that may be more meaningful on an individual level.

At the bottom of the article you’ll also find links to LEARN NC’s other blended learning resources, including a guide to implementing blended learning in your classroom, and online courses that teach various blended learning principles.

We invite you to browse our other education reference entries, from the achievement gap to the zone of proximal development.

We updated our home page and our website navigation today! If you’re wondering

Where did it go?

• New and timely content is now in the right-hand column of the home page, and will be featured on this blog.
• Best of the Web has been folded into our other collections. You’ll still find websites for students by searching our Learning Materials collection, and professional websites are under Best Practices.
• Some other links have been removed from the site navigation, but their destinations haven’t disappeared. You’ll find Discover NC and the Education Reference under Projects and Collections on the home page.
• The “hot topics” guides that used to be linked from the bottom of the home page are still available, either under Projects and Collections or simply by searching the website.

And if you’re also wondering

What else is new?

• We’ve made it easier for you to find scheduled online courses.
• The front pages of our Lesson Plans, Best Practices, and Learning Materials areas now feature a search, keyword browsing, and special collections of topical resources.
• North Carolina Digital History has a new cover that will make it easier to find specific topics and resources.

We’ve recently published a series of four videos that demonstrate chemistry lab techniques tied to measuring water quality. The videos are a result of a collaboration with Christine Muth of the North Carolina School of Science and Math, part of a unit on urban and natural streams that we’re working on publishing.

You can find the videos and a description of each below:

Measuring pH

In this video, Christine Muth of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics demonstrates how to measure pH of a water sample using two types of pH paper.

Measuring turbidity

In this video, Christine Muth of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics demonstrates how to measure turbidity, the lack of clarity of a sample of water.

Measuring dissolved oxygen

In this video, Christine Muth of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics demonstrates how to measure the level of dissolved oxygen in a water sample using a LaMotte test kit.

Measuring total dissolved solids

In this video, Christine Muth of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics demonstrates how to measure the total dissolved solids of a water sample using a Vernier conductivity probe.

What exactly is blended learning? In his 2010 NCTIES conference presentation, “Beyond blended learning: Reaching every student,” LEARN NC’s Bobby Hobgood defines blended learning as instruction that brings together traditional face-to-face classroom techniques with learning opportunities afforded by the internet, and adds that blended learning reflects a combination of three learning theories — cognitivism, constructivism, and performance support.

We’ve posted a video of Dr. Hobgood’s presentation in our Best Practices section. Viewers of this hour-long presentation will learn:

• what blended learning is,
• why blended learning is important,
• current research findings about blended learning,
• a theoretical framework underpinning the value of blended learning,
• what blended learning “looks like” in a classroom, and
• ten ways to improve teaching using a blended approach.

Access to the archived session requires Microsoft Silverlight software. If you don’t already have Silverlight installed, clicking on the link will prompt your browser to ask you if you’d like to download this free software.

Maybe you’ve heard about LEARN NC’s digital textbook for North Carolina History — or maybe this is the first time it’s crossed your radar. You may be wondering: What’s a digital textbook? How can I use it in my classroom?

We’re presenting a series of webinars this summer, beginning June 16, to answer those questions. Each will provide an overview of the textbook, examples of the kinds of primary and secondary resources available, some suggestions for using digital content in your classroom, and how you can use this digital textbook to build literacy and critical thinking skills.

To learn more, see the schedule, get a preview, and register, visit this page on our website.