News, information, and updates

Free mentoring experience for new biology teachers

Bill Ferris — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:59:00 +0000

So you’ve survived the first half of the school year. That doesn’t mean you can’t use more help. LEARN NC’s Virtual Mentoring: Biology experience lets teachers get expert help at any hour, day or night. Best of all, it’s available at no cost to the LEA, school, or teachers.

Virtual Mentoring: Biology covers topics ranging from classroom management to course content. In addition, participants will have access to a fully developed biology curriculum aligned to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, which they can use for the entire course or just a lesson for an upcoming class.

This Virtual Mentoring experience begins January 21 and will award teachers 3.0 CEUs upon completion.

For more information, please see the description in the course catalog.

Colonial NC in PDF

David — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:36:16 +0000

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.

Mandarin Chinese I textbook now available in beta

David — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:45:26 +0000

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.

Linguistics in North Carolina through lessons and videos

Emily — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:37:20 +0000

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:

The lesson plans, which incorporate video-viewing activities, are:

Download LEARN NC wallpapers

Bill Ferris — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:13:49 +0000

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!