Packaging resources - Submitting other content - Web Publishing & Collaboration Guide

LEARN NC is especially interested in publishing “packages” of resources that integrate instructional plans, best practices, and/or materials for student learning, including primary sources and multimedia. Teachers will be more likely to use and adapt upon a resource if they have everything they need, and by packaging resources instead of relying on external content, we can ensure that the value of a lesson plan or other resource won’t diminish if a link breaks or another website is no longer maintained.

“Packages” don’t have to be elaborate. Here are several ways you might design packages of materials for teachers.

Minilessons with primary sources

The simplest way to package resources is simply to offer an instructional plan that integrates a piece of learning content. “Learning content” may be a primary source document, an essay or informational article, an image, an audio or video clip, or any combination of those types of content.

You could write a full lesson plan around a piece of learning content, but you might also simply write some basic suggestions for classroom use. Any plan you write should have a clearly stated learning objective and ordered activities; an assessment is optional.

The sounds of prayer in Southeast Asia: Uses three audio clips and a map to spark a student discussion.
Using the George Wallace interview: Teacher’s guide to using an excerpt of an oral history interview.
Mountain dialect spoken here: A full lesson plan using an excerpt from a 19th-century book as a jumping-off point to help students achieve social studies and English language arts objectives.

Slideshows

A slideshow can be more than just a series of photographs with a script. It can, in fact, be something approaching a multimedia textbook, with detailed text and additional resources for student exploration.

Jocassee Gorges: Temperate rain forests of the Blue Ridge: One of a series of Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations, “virtual field trips” to areas of ecological and geological interest in North Carolina. Developed by a UNC Marine Sciences professor and his graduate students.
Contemporary life in Vietnam: A slideshow of photographs showing changes since the country’s reforms began in the 1990s. A photographer and an anthropologist contributed separately to this project.
Tobacco bag stringing: Life and labor in the Depression: Photographs with government and corporate records tell the story of workers facing hardship and poverty. (Accompanying lesson plans are in development.) Developed by UNC Libraries.

Lesson plans with resources for students

Many of our lesson plans include handouts of some kind, but we especially want to publish lesson plans that include the material students are to learn or learn from. These materials can be integrated in various ways.

Brown versus Board of Education: Rhetoric and realities: A lesson plan that uses oral history interviews to study the Civil Rights Movement.
Drawing a sea turtle: Step by step instructions with illustrations explain how to draw a sea turtle and to use art to explore anatomy.

Best practices with sample lesson plans

Best practices — explained through text and even multimedia — are easiest to understand and implement when accompanied by specific instructional strategies that demonstrate them.

Designing your gym class: An article on classroom management with accompanying lesson plans.
Problem Centered Math: Best practices articles, demonstration videos, problem sets, and lesson plans explain why student-centered mathematics instruction benefits students and how teachers can employ it successfully.