Free EU online course

We're at it again!

The UNC European Union Center of Excellence and LEARN NC will be offering The European Union – An Introduction for Teachers, an online professional development course. The course, which runs for four weeks (June 25-July 22), provides two CEUs and lots of online resources for learning and teaching. The goal of this course is to introduce in-service teachers to the history and the function of the European Union, as well as to digital resources and methods for student learning. By the end of the course, teachers will understand the EU as an essential part of European history, government, economics, and culture, and will be able to facilitate learning about the EU through use of technology. The final project is a standards-based technology-rich lesson plan incorporating online EU resources for each teacher’s class. Lesson plans will be submitted to the UNC European Union Center of Excellence for possible inclusion in the online lesson plan database. For more information, contact Dr. Regina Higgins.

Register here.

Global Teaching Articles on LEARN NC

Exciting to have my articles on global teaching featured on LEARN NC's home page.

For more information and links to the best practices articles, go to New on the Website.

More articles to come.  Watch here, and on LEARN NC.  

Europe Day

Coming up next week (May 9th, to be exact) is Europe Day, commemorating the occasion when Robert Schuman proposed the idea for a supranational European organization that would ultimately result in the creation of the European Union.

Are you teaching the European Union?  UNC's European Union Center of Excellence offers classroom resources for teaching the EU here.

You can also go to LEARN NC to learn more about Teaching the European Union and Using EUROPA to Teach the European Union , and  Teaching Contemporary Europe .

Bonne anniversaire, l'union européenne!

Teaching World Cultures

According to the new NC Professional Teaching Standards, all teachers will be required to "promote global awareness and its relevance" in classroom instruction. To support educators in the transition, LEARN NC is aligning all their professional development resources to the new standards.

You're a past master of global learning, of course. But if you have any colleagues who are a little uneasy about teaching globally, steer them to LEARN NC's new best practices article Teaching World Cultures for some general guidelines, specific strategies, and resources. Come to think of it, take look at it yourself, and post your comments and ideas here. There'll be more articles and resources on global teaching to come on LEARN NC.

Earth Day Every Day

This Wednesday, April 22nd, we'll celebrate our 39th Earth Day. Yes, we've been especially remembering our vital connection to the life of the earth on this day for thirty-nine years. To recap (and start preparing for next year's big 40th), you can read a short history of Earth Day, written by its founder, Senator Gaylord Nelson.

But shouldn't we be conscious of our reliance on earth's resources every day? Definitely. That's why LEARN NC offers Focus on Planet Earth with interactive sites, great lessons, and field trip ideas for North Carolina teachers. Bookmark this site and revisit it regularly--not just next week--for classroom resources for local and global environmental learning.

By all means, let's plant a special seedling or tree on Earth Day. But every day we can teach that our personal and public decisions about the environment are important for our shared life on earth. That's sustainable global learning.