ERC is pleased to announce that Tanya Bruce has joined the staff of the ERC as our Grants Administrator.
In this role Tanya will oversee and be responsible for the ERC’s grant administration work with the
three Environmental Education Teacher Training Programs located at Brevard College in North Carolina, Keystone College in Pennsylvania and William Jessup University in California. She will also administer the
Medical Information Digitization Project being
carried out in conjunction with the Western North Carolina Health Network, and
the International Trade and Small Business Institute program which is being
conducted in cooperation with area colleges and universities.
Tanya holds
a BA in Political Science from Lewis and Clark College and her Masters in Liberal Studies
from Hollins University.
Tanya’s may
be reached by e-mail at tbruce@ercwc.org.
Pisgah
Forest Institute (PFI) Media Operations Specialist Jayne Hall received the
prestigious C. Edward and Brona Roy Award at the Brevard College
Commencement Ceremony on May 12. That was in recognition for her many contributions to the College during four
years as a student. In 2005 - 06 she was the President of the Student
Government Association.
As of May
15, 2006
Dr. Robert A. Sweeney concluded his tenure as
the PFI Executive Director, a position that
he assumed in January 2000.
At that time the
Institute offered a single 5 -day summer workshop for high school teachers
in public schools. By securing grants and contracts from a breadth of
sources, Bob expanded both the number of courses as well as the subject matter
addressed. In 2005 – 2006, PFI has or will offer ten workshops including one
instructed via a distance learning format. Dr. Sweeney also
eliminated stipends for participants. Instead that money has been employed
to purchase teaching aids so that teachers could enrich the instruction of
subject matter that they learned in the PFI courses. While drawing upon forest
related topics for instructional materials, the Institute has focused
on the subject matter in the curricula that the educators were required by
state education departments to teach. He promoted hands-on,
inquiry-based pedagogy and instruction in forest environments. He also
instituted a rigorous system for securing assessments of each PFI offering both at end of each course
and up to seven months following graduation. The accomplishments of
the PFI program were primarily responsible
for Bob being elected in 2005 president of the Environmental Educators of North
Carolina, Inc. (EENC).
In 2004 Dr.
Sweeney brought the annual 14th annual EENC conference to Rosman and
Brevard. With more than 130 attendees, that gathering was one of the largest
such environmental meetings held in Transylvania County. It had an economic impact on that
area of more than $100,000. During his tenure with PFI Bob has encouraged PFI workshop participants to visit
local shops and sites of interest. As a result many educators have returned
to the area to shop and vacation with family and friends. Also the
majority of the more than $250,000 in grants and contracts
that he has annually secured have been expended in WNC. He also has a mass funding
for the PFI Endowment, a safety net to support senior staff in event of
a catastrophic decrease in external revenues.
"During
the past five years," related Bob, "I have been most
fortunate to have had staff each of whom has been highly intelligent,
conscientious and ambitious. Our program has benefited greatly from their suggestions
and creativity. Several students who were employed by PFI already are making major
contributions in the environmental consulting field. They attribute part of
their success to the experience gained at the Institute. We also have been able
to secure and utilized as highly effective instructors people from the public
and private sectors. The support and encouragement from Congressman Charles
Taylor and his staff also were of considerable aid. Without the participation
and other contributions from each of these individuals we would not
have been able to provide quality instruction for educators in 75 North Carolina counties, seven other states
as well as three foreign countries. Probably the most rewarding aspect of
this job for me has been the feedback from our workshop attendees regarding how
much that their pupils have benefited from the knowledge and instructional
materials that we have provided".
It is
anticipated that Dr. Sweeney will remain on the PFI staff as Senior Advisor through
June 2006, during which time he will participate in several of the summer
workshops being offered by the Institute. More information on the latter
courses can be found at www.brevard.edu/pfi.
Dr.
Jennifer Frick-Ruppert is the new Executive Director of the Appalachian Center
for Environmental Education (ACEE), which includes PFI. She has been a faculty member at Brevard College since 1997 and is currently
Associate Professor of Ecology and Environmental Studies. Her appointment will
be half-time with the faculty and half-time as Executive Director of ACEE/PFI.
PFI's
website is located at www.brevard.edu/pfi.
The countdown has begun for the start of the Watershed Explorers course on June 18th. Registration for the course is full at 25
elementary school teachers. As in the
past, we expect this year’s course to be a great success. Nora Dillon, Operations Coordinator for KceeI,
has been very busy procuring and organizing the free educational materials that
will be taken home by each participant.
The Keynote Speaker at the
opening evening banquet for the Watershed Explorers course is Greg
Matkosky. Greg is a local filmmaker who
has recently produced a documentary entitled Looking to the River. This
one-hour documentary film produced by WVIA Public Broadcasting examines
critical contemporary issues pertaining to the Susquehanna River's Middle
Basin—economic development, environmental protection, and cultural
preservation—through their connection to the profound history and heritage of
the river and its 27,000 square-mile watershed.
Through a blend of
authoritative content and distinctive imagery, Looking to the River
seeks to provide viewers with the knowledge that the Susquehanna River is the key to renewed economic
prosperity and revitalized quality of life in their communities. By enhancing their sense of place, the
production re-introduces viewers to an indispensable component of their future.
Such a connection between the people who live near the river and the natural
resources surrounding them will be a new wellspring from which the Susquehanna will flow, and continue to nurture the life forever drawn to
it.
Greg will speak about the
making of the film and show part of it during his presentation. A special thanks to WVIA for providing copies
of Looking to the River for each
participant. KceeI is looking forward to
another successful course.
On a different note, Howard
Jennings, Director of KceeI, just returned back from his 22nd annual
Whale Watch Trip to Provincetown, Rhode Island.
Despite some less than ideal weather, the group was able to see minke whales,
humpback whales, and an 80-ft long finback whale. It was a fantastic trip.
KceeI would
like to welcome Tanya Bruce to the Education and Research Consortium of the
Western Carolinas, Inc. We are looking
forward to her visit on June 17-23 for the Watershed Explorers course. Welcome aboard!
Just a
reminder…
KceeI’s
website is located at www.KceeI.keystone.edu.
Pacific Forest Institute
For updated
information on the Pacific Forest Institute, please visit our website at:
http://www.jessup.edu/academics/pacificforestinstitute.
Today ERC Broadband is hosting a computing
stakeholders meeting and roundtable to present the infrastructure of its high
performance computing center to regional government, education and industry
representatives. This is an exciting opportunity to showcase what ERC Broadband has put together and an
opportunity for those in the community to know that important technological
services such as disaster recovery, off-site storage and high performance
computing is available to them here in Asheville.
In the next
newsletter, ERC Broadband will share more details about the meeting including outcomes
that will further benefit the community and the economic development of the
region.
ERC Broadband’s website is located at: www.ercbroadband.org.
Western
North Carolina
The four Western North Carolina AAM
partners (Brevard
College,
Mars
Hill
College,
Montreat
College,
and Western
Carolina
University)
and AAM’s
Online Education office are collaborating on several initiatives to continue
serving educators in the region over the coming 18 months.
PROPEL Workshop Series
During May, WNC
AAM
directors and staff met several times in an intense effort to develop the
curriculum for PROPEL (Primary Resources Opening Portals to Enhance Learning),
a comprehensive program for school librarians and media specialists that will
kick off in July. Progress has been
excellent, but there is more to accomplish in this first-ever collaborative
effort. The PROPEL series will consist
of six workshops (30 hours in total) that will focus on the unique role of the
school librarian/media coordinator in providing support in curriculum
development and instruction.
Also in May, AAM
unveiled the “AAM
Learning Community” at www.aamlearning.org. This site uses a Moodle
platform and features online registration for PROPEL, online learning tools,
and forums. So far a number of
individuals have registered for PROPEL, a series that is targeted at more than
300 librarians and media specialists in the 18-county area of WNC. Attendees will have six locations around WNC
from which to select to attend the series.
On June 2, AAM
officially launched the PROPEL series at a luncheon in Asheville. First on the agenda was to recognize the
efforts of the AAM
School Librarian Advisory Committee (ASLAC) that developed the original concept
for this series. Addressing the group
were John Hunter,
ERC
Executive Director; Richard
Faulkner, District Representative for Congressman Charles Taylor (NC 11th
District); and Bob Pettis,
AAM
National Director.
More information about PROPEL is available at www.aamprogram.org and at www.aamlearning.org.
Online Professional Development Tool
Development continues of the online professional development
tool for educators, “An Introduction to Primary Sources.” Karen Kawa has been
employed to develop the flash content for the lesson. The tool will be accessed online in the AAM
Learning Community at www.aamlearning.org,
which allow the learners to track their progress in completion of the online
learning tool. This purpose of this tool is to extend the availability of
existing content submitted by AAM
partners for independent online use or as a part of a workshop.
Brevard College
During the month of May, Brevard AAM
completed a “Teaching with Primary Sources: Digital Storytelling” workshop at Brevard
Elementary School. Participants in this workshop created
documentary-style digital stories on topics such as “The Preamble to the
Constitution,” “The Bill of Rights,” “Transportation Now and Then,” “School
Days in the Old Days,” “Medieval Times,” and “The Pledge of Allegiance.”
Also in May, AAM
alumnae teacher Karen Garcia presented the 3rd Annual Depression Day
at Immaculata
Catholic
School
in Henderson
County. For the past three years, Karen has worked
with her third grade students to teach them about the Depression and to help
them understand the conditions in which people lived during that time. Her students participated in photo analysis
activities by choosing a photograph from the Depression Era Collection that
“spoke to them.” They then wrote
personal thoughts about their chosen image and published the collection of
photographs and writings in a keepsake booklet for themselves and their parents
entitled, “The Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl: A Visual Literacy
Study from American Memory.” In order to
extend their learning, the students organized “Depression Day” and invited
their families and the community at-large to come and eat Depression Era food
and enjoy a program of Depression Era cultural events and icons. This was a wonderful presentation by the
students and is a great example of the application of the AAM
curriculum in the classroom.
Looking ahead to the summer months, Brevard AAM
will offer four “Teaching with Primary Sources: Digital Storytelling Level II”
workshops. Participants in these
workshops will build on their knowledge of primary sources and digital
storytelling technology to create a documentary-style digital story that
focuses on a local primary source and includes an oral history interview. Look for information on these digital stories
in upcoming newsletters.
Brevard’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://www.brevard.edu/aam/.
Mars Hill College
During the week of May 24, the Mars Hill AAM
team traveled to Fayetteville
Technical
Community College
to teach a Digital Storytelling workshop to 11 teachers and media coordinators
and two staff members. Dr. Ed Shearin,
Elizabeth Lang, and AnneMarie Walter shared their exciting strategies for using
digital cameras and the digital resources of the Library of Congress to enrich
the curriculum with story telling.
Ed attended the Distance Learning Alliance
Conference held at AB Tech Community College in Asheville,
NC. He participated in three sessions with ED
tech guru David Warlick. Several AAM
teachers were also in attendance.
Mars Hill’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://www.mhc.edu/aamind/.
Montreat College
On May 30th Montreat AAM
staff concluded their last workshop series for the school year. Twenty
participants at Chase
Middle School
put the finishing touches on their digital stories and left proudly with their
stories ready for next year’s use. Many of the teachers shared that they have
already implemented some of the modeled primary source photo analysis
activities and story boarding techniques into their current classes.
Wendy and Brian are busy making preparations for the summer.
Registration for Montreat’s June summer institutes closed on May 31st with more
than 25 participants scheduled to attend the advanced level of digital
storytelling. Registration for July’s institute will remain open until
mid-June.
Montreat’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://aam.montreat.edu/.
Western Carolina University
The WCU AAM
program has completed scheduling all teacher-based Phase II workshops. During
April and May, the program completed workshops with six schools. During June,
WCU’s program will work with six schools to complete the 15-hour series.
One school will be completing a 30-hour series.
WCU is also working with the Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville program and the Online Education Program in preparation for the
National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) presentation in July. AAM
directors are presenting on three levels of primary source utilization by
teachers.
Last week, WCU-AAM
staff members visited Franklin
High School
in Macon
County
to view student-made projects. Their classroom teacher has participated in the
WCU-AAM
program and was excited to have the AAM
staff visit. The students were in Advanced Placement U.S. history and prepared
projects on U.S.
people, places, and/or events. Part of their project was to use primary sources
and develop a digital story representing their theme. Images were used to
display emotion, motivate, focus on details, and provide visual recognition of
the themes. The digital stories were magnificent!
WCU’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://aam.wcu.edu.
California University of Pennsylvania
St. Patrick’s Catholic
School
A total of 21 grate PK-8 teachers attended two separate AAM
workshops, “WebQuests: An Adventure in Online Learning” and “Bringing Adventure
to the Classroom.” The workshops were
delivered on-site at the school by Byron Holdiman.
Summer Institute 2006
The Summer Institute 2006 team convened for final planning
of the week-long event scheduled for June 26-30. The daily events were set by the team and the
AAM
staff began preparing marketing materials for the event and a strategy for
distribution of the materials. Institute
promotion commenced via e-mail, direct mail, and phone contacts. Complete details of the event are at http://www.cup.edu/education/aam/index.jsp?pageId=1580830010421146978228257
Veterans Oral Histories Project at California
University
of Pennsylvania
AAM
staff visited Washington
High School
to conduct a training session for 22 11th grade students in Connie Trelka’s
Advanced Placement History class. The
students will conduct interviews before the end of the school year and submit
them to California
University
for inclusion in the special collection at Manderino Library as well as the
LOC.
California
area middle school students submitted six oral histories of local veterans who
served in one or more of our nation’s conflicts to AAM
staff, who will begin and complete the digitization process and then forward
them to Manderino Library staff so they can be properly recorded and prepared
for inclusion in the local and national databases.
Byron Holdiman continued to digitize submitted oral
histories for placement on Cal’s
AAM
Web site. Forty-five of the 57 submitted
oral histories are available for viewing on the AAM
Web site at
http://www.cup.edu/education/aam/aamworks.jsp?pageId=1580830010421131321810329
Other
AAM
staff members gave program updates to seven university faculty during May. AAM
staff continued working on revamping the workshop formative evaluation forms to
match workshop objectives as they are re-established. Two people from West
Virginia University
visited with AAM
staff to discuss the AAM
program and learn first-hand about the challenges of starting and operating a
similar program at WVU.
CUP’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://www.cup.edu/education/aam.
University of South Carolina Upstate
USC
Upstate concluded its AAM
program in May 2006.
USCS’s AAM
program Web site is located at: http://www.uscupstate.edu/academics/education/adventure_mind.asp.
Northern
Virginia Schools Partnership
The Northern Virginia
partnership is gearing up for a wonderful summer of professional development
programs. The partnership expects to work with just over 100 teachers
participating in summer institutes as follow-up activities from programs held
during the school year. Another 500
teachers will be served through a variety of national and local conference
programs and special workshops in school districts around the state of Virginia.
Northern Virginia teachers will
take advantage of their proximity to the Library in a new program this summer
attending a special Research Orientation at the LOC to research a curricular
topic using the main reading room. Everyone is invited to sign up to receive
our newsletters through e-mail at http://www.pslearning.org/mlist.shtml
.
Northern Virginia’s
AAM
program Web site is located at: http://www.aamnva.org/.
Online
Education
Fiddler of
the Festival Winner
The Music
of Panhandle Pete, an online
lesson from the AAM Online Education Program, motivated Danielle Bishop, a WNC home school student to enter the Junior Old Time Fiddlers
Competition at Fiddler's Grove, the
oldest continuous ole time fiddler’s contest in North America. After
winning first place for her division, Danielle competed with the winners of all
of the divisions (adult and children) and won the "Fiddler of the
Festival" award! Danielle’s mom, Jené
Bishop, wanted to let the AAM program to know that lesson started something!
North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance Conference
On May 16, Dr. Pam Johnson presented “Using Primary Sources in Project Based
Lessons” at the North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance Conference in Asheville. Approximately 20 educators attended the presentation, which provided an
introduction to online project based lessons
developed by the AAM Online Education Program. The presentation also included a
discussion of the design and development tools used to create these online
lessons.
Presentation to Jackson County Home School
Association
Dr. Pam Johnson
presented an overview to the AAM
Home School Program to the Jackson County Christian Home School Group 1st
Annual Home Educators Fair on May 11 in Sylva.
Ed-U-Bits
Each month,
the AAM Online Education staff writes a
short article on topics of interest for educators who are using online
resources as a part of their curriculum.
These articles are called “Ed-U-Bits” and are included with the monthly
newsletters for home school educators and public and private school educators.
The May Ed-U-Bit is Scrapbooking in
Today’s Classroom. This Ed-U-Bit includes teaching tips for scrapbooking
and suggestions for more than 30 projects in five subject areas.
Student
Projects
The
student’s projects page is now located in the Local Resources section of the AAM
Home School Web site. Since students are continually adding work to this page,
two lessons are highlighted each month. This month’s highlighted lessons are:
Heather’s
report on Shackleford Banks –
Heather learned about the history and future of the horses of Shackleford
Banks. She documented her research using image tables and answered questions on
prepared worksheets included in the lesson.
Micah’s project on the state of Hawaii - Through completing
the Nifty Fifty lesson, Micah has written an article,
and provided some
information about the traditions of the Hawaiian culture.
The AAM
Online Education program Web sites are located at: http://www.aamhomeschool.org/
http://aamonline.org/.