A list of all the seminars can be found on the National Humanities Center website. For North Carolina teachers, three seminars will earn one CEU credit. Also, for NC teachers, the National Humanities Center will waive the registration fee. Teachers must email Caryn Koplik directly for free registration.

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

The books capture the Latino/a experience in the Durham community by retelling stories from the community’s members. Duke University Spanish service-learning students conducted interviews with Latino/a students in local elementary schools and it is the children’s experiences that have been developed into the story lines of the bilingual books.

The books can be found online along with fun, educational activities related to the stories, such as crossword puzzles and word searches in English and Spanish that will aid in the development of young children’s bilingual vocabulary and reading comprehension. Hard copies, as well as the online scanned versions of the books, are distributed free of charge so that all children have the additional resources they need to succeed in school and life.

The practicum is designed to be a guided first step into the virtual classroom, with help from expert online instructors. LEARN NC will be there to support you, reinforcing the best practices you learned throughout the COLT program, and addressing your questions and concerns.

Mentoring

Based on the course you teach, LEARN NC will find you a mentor from the COLT faculty. Online mentoring will consist of structured conversations via phone and email. Your mentor will also spend time in the course itself to offer advice where appropriate.

Requirements

• You may teach or adapt a shared course from the LEARN NC catalog, or you can create your own course.
• Your course must run a minimum of five weeks, with a maximum length of one semester.
• The course must be fully online. While we recognize the educational value of hybrid courses (courses where the class meets both online and offline), they are outside the focus of the COLT program.
• Though LEARN NC uses Moodle as its online learning management system, you are not required to conduct your practicum experience on Moodle. We encourage you to use whatever learning management system (LMS) is favored by your school or LEA.

Admission

• Admission is on a rolling basis.
• You must notify LEARN NC 30 days before your proposed start date.
• If you are creating your own course, it must be completed thirty days prior to scheduling your practicum.

For full details, please visit the practicum course description. If you have further questions about the practicum, please contact Bill Ferris.

Educators can find more information about the Center in LEARN NC’s Discover NC section. Also check out the field guide, “Walnut Creek: A Guide to Exploring Urban Wetlands” created by Exploris Middle School Students. Over the course of a year, the students investigated the wetlands. Using cameras and waterproof journals, they recorded everything they saw and experienced, from tracks made by raccoons and coyotes to the lowliest leopard slugs and sea lampreys. They presented their work to the city of Raleigh in 2008 to be placed in the new Walnut Creek Wetlands Center. LEARN NC is proud to be able to bring this work to you on our site in PDF format.