Archives: We’re working on it

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 20^th 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

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.

Part 2 of our digital textbook for North Carolina history is scheduled to be published on August 22. Called Grand visions, rough realities: The development of colonial North Carolina, it will contain 67 pages of primary sources and background reading, plus guides for using the kinds of primary sources provided. Also included in this module are interactive maps built on Google maps technology, video animations, “zoomable” maps and illustrations, and at least 200 other photographs, paintings, illustrations, and maps.

If you are planning to use the digital textbook in your classroom and would like a preview before the 22d, please contact us and we’ll be happy to send you a temporary guest login and the double-secret URL.

Part 1, Two worlds: Prehistory, contact, and the Lost Colony, is already available 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.

LEARN NC is making some major changes to its website this month! We’ve been working on the new layout and design for several months, and the new site will go live Friday, June 20.

Why are we making the changes?

We’ve been developing a great deal of content lately that simply didn’t fit well into the current site. It’s hard to find, and as a result, teachers aren’t easily able to use it.

How did we decide what changes to make?

A combination of usability tests, website usage data, user feedback, and informal conversations with teachers told us what teachers use and don’t use and what they like and don’t like.

What new features will be added?

The search tool will be streamlined and easier to use, and the navigation has been simplified. We’ve also tried to make our original published content for teachers and students — lesson plans, student activities, best practices, multimedia, even help — more easily accessible and usable. We’re also providing a full catalog of our online courses. Finally, the new site will be easier for us to maintain — which means we can spend more time developing and publishing new resources for North Carolina’s classrooms.

Are any features going away?

“LEARN NC for Students” will no longer exist in its present form. We found that this part of the site didn’t get nearly as much use as other parts, and we want to focus our energies on serving our core audience — teachers. The “Hot Topics” pages for each grade level will still be available, though, and a single section of the new website will house “Learning Materials,” resources you can use with students or that students can use on their own.

Whenever we watch teachers use the LEARN NC website — at workshops or in formal usability studies — we find that our search tool confuses them because it doesn’t work like Google’s (or like almost any other search tool on the web). While Google looks for sites matching all the words in your search query, ours matches any of the words you type — which can result in a lot of irrelevant search results.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve fixed this problem: Our search now matches all of the words you search for, so that a search for “English language learners” doesn’t find every page of our website with the word “learners” in it. The top hits will usually be the same as before, and so while this is a fairly drastic change to the functionality of our website, you may not actually notice a difference. But if you do notice, we think you’ll see an improvement.

As always, please tell us what you think! Leave a comment here, or drop us a line.