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About LEARN NC
LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Education,
finds the most innovative and successful practices in K–12 education and makes them available to the teachers
and students of North Carolina — and the world.
David Walbert
Editorial Director & Lead Designer/Developer
Contact information
David Walbert
Editorial Director & Lead Designer/Developer
LEARN NC
140 Friday Center Drive CB #7216
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill,
NC,
27599-7216
Voice 919-962-8888
Fax 919-962-8940
David Walbert is managing editor for the LEARN NC website and is responsible for all of LEARN NC's educational publications. He also oversees development of various web applications including LEARN NC's website and content management systems and is the organization's primary web, information, and visual designer. (Essentially he is in charge of communications, but he finds that if he tells people this they think he does P.R., when in fact that is the one thing he doesn't do.) David has worked with LEARN NC since August 1997.
An erstwhile cultural historian and onetime aspiring theoretical physicist, David holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America, published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. He formerly served on the Board of Directors of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and is widely if accidentally known for raising Khaki Campbell ducks. In his spare time he enjoys rustling cats, herding snails, taking his basset hound for hikes along the Eno River, and telling his daughter to quit jumping on the furniture.
Resources developed by David Walbert
Records 1–11 of 11 displayed.
- Writing for the Web
- How teachers can more effectively communicate information and ideas via the World Wide Web, to students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and the world.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: edition
- Best practices in school library website design
- You're a librarian, not a web designer, but you can have a school library website that meets the needs of students and teachers if you keep it simple, don't take on more than you can manage, and focus on what you know.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- Media: image
- Does my vote count? Teaching the electoral college
- Students will learn about the electoral process and its history through reading, research, and discussion. They will then convene a constitutional convention to debate altering this process.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: lesson plan (grade 10)
- Evaluating multimedia presentations
- A PowerPoint presentation is just another form of communication, and the same rules apply to multimedia that apply to writing or verbal communication. This article offers guidelines for using and assigning multimedia presentations in the classroom and includes a rubric based on the Five Features of Effective Writing.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- From documents to digitization
- To design a research project using primary sources from the Web, you'll need to know what's out there and how to find it. This article explains what's available, why, and where.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- Higher order thinking with Venn diagrams
- Graphic organizers are powerful ways to help students understand complex ideas. By adapting and building on basic Venn diagrams, you can move beyond comparison and diagram classification systems that encourage students to recognize complex relationships.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- Keep it short (but not too short)
- Shorter paragraphs and pages will help make your writing easier to read on the web, but you don't have to sacrifice important content.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- The not-so-famous person report
- Instead of teaching the history of the famous, use research in primary sources to teach students that the past and present were made by people like them.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- Scannability: organizing for the web
- How you organize and format your writing can go a long way toward making it readable.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- To link or not to link? Using hypertext wisely
- Links are the soul of the web, but make sure they support your content rather than detracting from it.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page
- Transit of Venus
- On June 8, 2004, a transit of Venus will occur, the first in 122 years. This article explains what a transit is, why it matters, and when and how you can safely view it.
- Author: David Walbert
- Format: article/single page