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:

• Standards alignment. Throughout the school year, we’ll be aligning our collection of hundreds of lesson plans to the new state standards.
• Digital NC history for fourth grade. We’re developing an educator’s guide to facilitate fourth-grade teachers’ use of our North Carolina digital history textbook.
• Online courses. Check out the full slate of over fifty new online courses for the fall.

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.

The Outreach Center of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies is offering a free webinar for teachers, featuring educator-created resources and lessons plans for teaching about September 11 in 5th- through 12th-grade classrooms.

The one-hour webinar, entitled “Responding to the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 in the Classroom,” is scheduled for August 25th and will begin at 7 pm EDT. Presentations and discussions will take place entirely online, using an Elluminate virtual classroom. This platform runs through Java, and does not require any downloading of additional software.

For more information and to register, see the webinar description on the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies website.

Teaching contemporary history can pose a variety of challenges, particularly when teaching the history of a traumatic event like the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In preparation for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the National Museum of American History, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Pentagon Memorial Fund, and Flight 93 National Memorial recently offered an online conference for K-12 teachers. The conference included roundtable discussions with content experts and six workshop sessions that shared strategies, ideas, and resources, and encouraged conversations on how to document, preserve, and interpret recent history and current events.

Teachers can now access archived sessions from the conference, along with K-12 lessons and activities from each organization and background information on September 11.

We’ve just listed over fifty online professional development courses for fall 2011. The fall offerings from North Carolina e-Learning for Educators include courses for our Carolina On-line Teacher (COLT) program as well as Moodle training, content-area courses, and courses designed to help teachers work with special populations. As always, each course was created using a researched model of effective professional development and the online format allows participants to work at a time and place most convenient to them.

About North Carolina E-Learning for Educators

North Carolina’s leaders in online professional development have collaborated on a series of courses that will bolster content knowledge and classroom technology integration at an affordable cost, with the convenience and flexibility only possible online.

North Carolina e-Learning for Educators is a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, UNC-TV, LEARN NC, The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University College of Education, and the North Carolina Virtual Public School. This program is based upon work supported by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

For a full list of available courses, please visit our online courses page.

We’re pleased to report that we’ve just published Mandarin Chinese AP, an advanced-level digital textbook for secondary students of the Mandarin language. This freely-available advanced textbook is the final edition in a series of digital Mandarin textbooks:

• Mandarin I
• Mandarin II
• Mandarin III
• Mandarin IV

Mandarin AP is designed to help students synthesize the skills they’ve acquired in the four previous courses and expand their knowledge of the Chinese language and culture. The four chapters in this online textbook cover a variety of interesting topics including sports, foreign travel, literary figures, ancient characters, and film.

All five textbooks feature video vignettes that introduce new language and culture. Each vignette is accompanied by a transcript and vocabulary list that presents both the traditional and simplified versions of the language. The textbooks also include a clickable audio link for each line of the vocabulary, making it possible to hear expressions and individual words as often as students like. All video and audio can easily be downloaded to a portable device or personal computer.

The textbooks were produced in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina Virtual Public School and were developed as content for online courses funded by a Foreign Language Assistance Program grant from the U.S. Government. For more information, including the recently published digital Arabic I textbook, see LEARN NC’s critical languages page.

On Thursday, June 16, UNC-TV will air the documentary “Learning with the World,” which visits classrooms across the state to see how students are learning about critical languages — Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian.

LEARN NC has supported and helped produce North Carolina’s critical language program, creating online courses and digital language textbooks for the Department of Public Instruction.

The 26-minute documentary will air at 9:30 p.m. For more details, see Learning with the World on the UNC-TV website.

Big changes are afoot at LEARN NC as we pack up and move to our new physical location on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. During this transition, from June 9 to June 15, our offices will be closed.

But, as always, you can still find us on the web at www.learnnc.org!

The Teachers for Global Classrooms (TGC) is a program of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). This program is offering a professional development opportunity for middle and high school teachers from the United States to participate in a program aimed at globalizing U.S. classrooms. Travel destinations under this program include Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, and Ukraine.

Activities include:

• An online course designed specifically for US teachers aiming to globalize their classrooms;
• Two Global Education Symposiums in Washington, DC (pre- and post-travel); and
• An international fellowship through a two-week country visit upon successful completion of the online course.

Participants are selected through a national, open competition. Eligible applicants must be U.S. citizens and full-time secondary-level (middle or high school) teaching professionals with five or more years of classroom experience in disciplines including English as a Second Language, English Language or Literature, Social Studies, Mathematics, or Science.

Watch this video to hear teachers tell of their experiences in the programs.

The deadline for applications is June 15, 2011. For more information, download the application instructions (PDF) and apply at the IREX Application System page.

Cheryl Mason Bolick, the Director of Research & Professional Development for Outreach at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, sent the following update to our email list:

Greetings!

It is a great honor to write my inaugural LEARN NC monthly email update! I
have been a consumer of LEARN NC’s resources for 15 years, and the
instructional materials and learning opportunities have significantly
shaped my teaching and research. It’s amazing for me to consider how many
of you access LEARN NC for online resources and professional development.I
am excited to be a new member of the LEARN NC team!

As many of you are counting down the final days of the 2010-2011 school
year, those of us here at LEARN NC are hard at work continuing to provide
online professional development and online resources for educators.
For many of you summer is somewhat of a sabbatical from the classroom.
Sabbatical is a time to pause and to revitalize.

I seem to start every summer with a list of tasks I hope to accomplish
during my vacation. At the top of my list this year are: piloting new iPad
apps, editing family videos, reading a long list of books, and taking long
walks on the beach. As you make your summer “to-do” list, we hope you will
add LEARN NC to your list. We aim to be your “go-to” place to tap into
instructional resources and professional development.

Our online collections are bursting with resources that can help you
refresh your instruction for the 2011-2012 school year. We also still have
available spaces on summer online professional development courses. A list
of these courses is at the bottom of this email.

As you write your summer postcards, you may enjoy browsing UNC’s
collection of historical postcards. Check out the site to view postcards
from your hometown or favorite vacation spot.

We are delighted to present the online publishing of digital textbooks for
instruction in Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. The online textbooks are free
and offer a myriad of resources to understand the language. The textbooks
include video of native speakers with transcripts, guidance in reading and
writing the language, and cultural notes on each lesson. These textbooks
are a great to explore the languages. You can find it on the LEARN NC
site here.

We’ve wrapped up our year-long series on differentiated instruction, which
included eight research-based articles by experts, classroom videos,
slideshows of student work, interactive web conferences, and an online
professional learning community. The article series, along with the
associated videos and slideshows, can be accessed on the LEARN NC website. Archived recordings of the web conferences are also available.

As you all know, the NCSCOS is in the middle of a major transformation. We
know that this will require teachers to rework their curriculum alignment.
LEARN NC is making some key investments of time and effort to help. We’re
launching an initiative to align all future instructional resources with
the new standards. We are beginning work to align our existing collection
to the new Common Core and Essential Standards. For now, you can view the
text of the new Common Core and Essential Standards on our curriculum
standards page.

I know how precious time is to each of you. I hope that when you see LEARN
NC Monthly Update in your inbox, you will pause and take the time to learn
what’s percolating from LEARN NC. Our staff is hard at work to continue to
provide online professional development and online instructional resources
to assist you and your students.

You can plan on receiving our monthly emails to update you on our most
recent work and professional development opportunities. If you know of a
colleague who would like to receive our monthly emails, please encourage
her or him to sign up for monthly emails.

We have another way to stay in touch with you — LEARN NC’s blog. Here
you’ll have access to LEARN NC’s news, information, and updates. It’s our
way of more immediately sharing professional resources with you. It’s also
a place where you can share with us. We encourage you to let us hear from you!

Speaking of blogs, check out the University Library’s Civil War day by day
blog. Check it out to see what was happening 150 years ago today!

In closing, we are excited to announce that we will be relocating our
offices to UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education. We plan to move into
Peabody Hall next month. We look forward to moving in-house with our
School of Education colleagues and look forward to increasing our collaboration
with faculty from across the UNC campus. Our physical office will be
closed June 9- June 15 to allow for the move. Our website and online
courses will continue to function as normal.

All the best in these final days of the school year,

Cheryl

Cheryl Mason Bolick
Associate Professor
Director of Research and Professional Development for Outreach
School of Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

If you’d like to receive LEARN NC’s monthly email updates, please submit your contact information via this page.

On Saturday, the News and Observer reported that archaeologists had successfully recovered a 3000-pound anchor from the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the ship intentionally grounded by the pirate Blackbeard in 1718.

For those students inspired by this incredible feat, or generally affected by pirate mania, we encourage you to share Nicholas Graham’s article “The Life and Death of Blackbeard the Pirate,” which appears in the colonial module of the North Carolina Digital History textbook. The article draws this description of the notorious pirate from a 1726 book about pirates:

In Time of Action, he wore a sling over his Shoulders, with three Brace of Pistols, hanging in Holsters like Bandaliers; and stuck lighted Matches under his Hat, which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.

That description, along with the article’s account of the harrowing firefight that led to Blackbeard’s demise, is sure to satisfy even the most die-hard pirate aficionado. (And for those hungry for still more, you can browse our collection for other Blackbeard-related resources.)