If you’re looking for archived sessions from this year’s interactive fall conference, fear not: They’re on the way! We’re working on making them available in the most usable format, and we expect to have them up on the website by the end of the month. In the meantime, you can revisit the conference agenda here.
We hope you and your students are off to a great start of the new school year. As always, we’re hard at work on a number of projects designed to support your teaching, including:
And we’ve got more in the works! We’ll be providing updates here as these projects progress, so please stay tuned. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
North Carolina’s Standard Course of Study is in the midst of a complete overhaul. In the 2012-2013 academic year, North Carolina will begin using new standards in teaching and assessment. LEARN NC is working to make sure that our collection of instructional resources aligns with the new standards and that teachers can easily find the materials they need on our website.
During the 2011-2012 school year, we’ll be aligning our collection of lesson plans to the new standards, and we’ll make those alignments available as we go. Teachers will be able to use the new Common Core and Essential Standards to navigate to lesson plans and other instructional materials, just as they can with the current Standard Course of Study.
For now, you can view the text of the new Common Core and Essential Standards on our curriculum standards page. The current Standard Course of Study is still available on that page as well, and can still be used to find resources for teaching.
We look forward to supporting teachers through this momentous change, and, as always, we welcome your feedback!
LEARN NC has rescheduled the Moodle upgrade to Saturday, December 4 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition, Moodle will be unavailable between 11:30PM and Midnight on Tuesday, November 30 and Thursday, December 2.
In addition to a number of security updates and visual enhancements, the LEARN NC Moodle 1.9 upgrade will bring added functionality to the following:
Videos reviewing both the new gradebook and wiki are available here:
The Helpdesk will be available for further questions:
Email: helpdesk@learnnc.org
Phone: 919-962-HELP (4357)
AOL Instant Messenger: LEARN NC Help
On Monday, November 15, LEARN NC and North Carolina e-Learning for Educators will begin using Moodle version 1.9. To facilitate the transition, the Moodle server will be down on November 13 and 14. Students and instructors should plan accordingly.
In addition to a number of security updates and visual enhancements, the Moodle 1.9 upgrade will bring added functionality to the course email system, the course Wiki plug-in, and the grade book. These new enhancements have better up-front instructions, information display, and a much more intuitive and streamlined interface.
If you experience any problems with the new version of Moodle, please contact the Help Desk by email, or call 919-962-HELP (4357).
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.
January 2010 director’s message:
As promised, we’ve added the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards search to the LEARN NC website. You can find it on the left-hand menu of the LEARN NC website under the “Standards” heading.
I’ve picked up on a lot of anxiety from teachers about how their performance will be evaluated from now on as a result of these standards. With this addition to the website, they can find professional development and classroom resources that will help them address each of these new criteria.
Right now, searching according to the standards returns only our online professional development courses. We’re working on making our Best Practices and instructional models searchable too, and we expect this work to be completed by the start of the 2010-2011 school year.
We tried to make this new feature as simple as possible, borrowing the format of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study search tool you’re already used to. If you want to find a resource aligned to, say, Standard 4: Teachers facilitate learning for their students, just click on the Standard 4 link. The standard is now broken down by each sub-point. When you find the area you’re looking for, click the “Find related resources” link. You’ll see a list of everything we have that addresses that standard. It’s easy enough that it will probably take you longer to read this paragraph than to learn how to use it.
Teachers are busy, overworked and stressed-out. We made our courses searchable according to the Professional Teacher Standards as a way to make teachers’ lives a little easier. Of course, we rely on you to tell us whether we’re succeeding. If you know of a way we can make this feature even more useful to you, please say so in the comments, or feel free to contact me personally.
Sincerely,
Melissa Thibault
Executive Director
LEARN NC is proud to be a partner with the North Carolina Distance Learning Association. Bobby Hobgood, Director of Research and Development in Online Curriculum and Instruction, serves as the conference chair for NCDLA. Through his involvement, NCDLA has reached out to the K-12 community to create a K-20 organization. LEARN has developed and supported the NCDLA website and last year’s Virtual Conference which included 655 registrants from around the U.S.
This year, NCDLA offers a series of webinars and a Blended Conference on distance education. For the price of the $25 membership, educators can participate in four webinars and the eight webinars that comprise the virtual component of the Blended Conference. The face-to-face component of the Blended Conference will take place in New Bern, North Carolina. on April 8-9, 2010. Members receive a reduced rate to attend that event. For more details on how you can become a member and supplement your professional development, see http://www.usdla-nc.org
December 2009 director’s message:
As the year end approaches and the New Year looms, it seems a good time to reflect on our accomplishments. It’s been an amazing year here at LEARN NC!
This month we’ll complete our digital textbook for grade-8 social studies, with nine modules published and the final two under review. North Carolina: A Digital History is the first digital textbook developed specifically to align with North Carolina standards and made freely available on the open Web. Like the previously published chapters, the recently posted Early 20th Century module features primary sources in a variety of formats, including letters dating from the 1920s in which citizens lobby the state government to build and maintain a system of roads, and oral histories capturing the experiences of men and women who were part of the early textile industries in North Carolina. We’ve piloted this material in classrooms across the state, and teachers have responded positively. In the words of Steven Fall, who teaches in Whiteville, NC, North Carolina: A Digital History “. . . is very specific . . . If we are studying the regulator movement and there is a whole section on the regulator movement. It’s not like someone put in a paragraph on the regulator movement because they had to.”
True to our commitment to free and open content, we continue to provide standards-aligned lesson plans featuring innovative instructional strategies. In partnership with the UNC Chapel Hill School of Social Work, for example, we completed the publication of CareerStart lessons for grade 6, grade 7, and grade 8, career-infused middle school lessons for English language arts, science, social studies and math. We’ve also continued developing and delivering online critical-language courses in Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and, soon, Japanese, all offered through North Carolina Virtual Public School. These courses are accompanied by LEARN NC’s open-source, multimedia-rich textbooks and allow students to connect with conversation coaches via free Web conferencing tools .
Our newest sharable professional development course is Modern Math Teaching, a three-week course developed and taught by Dan Meyer for teachers in grades 7-12. This course, which was recently piloted in Currituck County, focuses on transforming everyday digital media into teaching artifacts, creating classrooms with a culture of curiosity, where nothing is off limits to analysis. In Modern Math Teaching, everything is a potential learning experience, from prices at the grocery store to mile markers on our state’s highways. School systems may download and teach this course, or register as participants with LEARN NC.
The date “2010″ sounds so sci-fi to me, yet when you look at the work we’re doing, futuristic images really seem to fit! Whether you are presently considering the classroom applications for Google Wave or Tweeting your appreciation for the latest contributions from your virtual Personal Learning Network, you are engaged in a learning environment that teachers 10 years ago could not imagine. If your New Year’s resolution is to keep up with what’s going on, keep that promise to yourself by connecting with LEARN NC and Instructify every day!
Sincerely,
Melissa Thibault
Executive Director
mthibault at learnnc.org
In workrooms across the state, teachers are talking about the new North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards* and the new teacher evaluation instrument**. With this new evaluation, even an experienced teacher has room to grow, since each goal is measured not as an absolute, but along a continuum, from developing through accomplished. That’s a major shift, and I’ve heard from a lot of teachers worried about how to satisfy these new criteria.
LEARN North Carolina is taking measures that will make this transition easier. By the time the evaluation is implemented statewide, you’ll be able to use LEARN NC to find standards-aligned professional materials the same way you use the Standard Course of Study matrix to navigate to standards-aligned lesson plans.
We’ve already aligned our online professional development to the new standards. For example, both A Crash Course in ESL and Crossing Cultures address Standard II – “creating a respectful environment for a diverse population of student.” Next up for alignment is our extensive collection of best practices — successful strategies from North Carolina’s most engaging and innovative teachers and research-based instructional approaches you can use in your classroom —tomorrow. To help teachers make the connections between these professional resources and their practice, LEARN NC is developing a matrix of the new North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards, so teachers can easily navigate to exactly the course, article, or instructional resource they need in our collection.
We’re excited about this new development, and we hope it takes the guesswork out of dealing with the new standards. Do you have ideas on how to make it even better? We need your input to continue to meet the needs of teachers and students across the state. Leave a comment below, or feel free to send me an email.
I hope to hear from you soon!
Melissa
mthibault at learnnc.org
*North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards
**NC Teacher Evaluation instrument
What's happening, what's coming up: from LEARN NC.
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