LEARN NC

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Web Publishing & Collaboration Guide

For LEARN NC partners

Introduction

In a decade of service LEARN NC has published many different kinds of content for teachers, students, and administrators, including lesson plans, best practices articles, multimedia, and works that approach book length. Many of our longer publications integrate classroom content with instructional plans and resources for teacher professional development.

Whatever form our web content takes, a lesson we learned a long time ago still applies: Teachers know teaching, and they shouldn’t have to know web publishing. A good educator may have wonderful ideas and strategies to share, but is unlikely to be a professional writer, editor, photographer, multimedia developer, and web designer — all jobs required to build a usable, accessible, attractive website!

This manual is designed to help educators working with LEARN NC.

  1. Submitting lesson plans. Writing a lesson plan for another teacher to implement is not like writing one for yourself; writing successfully requires addressing many assumptions you may not realize you had and presenting associated materials in a clear, usable manner. And while publishing materials to the web opens new possibilities, it also creates new opportunities for confusion. The first section covers what you need to know about writing and submitting lesson plans for publication.
  2. Submitting other content. LEARN NC welcomes submissions of best practice articles, photographs, and audio and video recordings. Our guidelines for creating and submitting this content includes information that can somewhat technical, but following them ensures that we will have all the raw materials we need to make your content as usable as possible on the web.
  3. Copyright is a complicated issue, and few educators fully understand it, because within the confines of the classroom it is rarely an issue. Section three addresses what educators need to know within their classrooms and what they need to consider when they develop content for the web.

This manual is lengthy, but we hope it isn’t overwhelming. If you’re considering developing content for LEARN NC, treat it as a menu of possibilities rather than as a list of restrictions. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact LEARN NC’s editorial staff.