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February 2008
iEARN-Azerbaijan
GCE Teachers Actively Engaged in Professional Development, Environmental Projects, and Program Promotion
Two teachers that recently completed online courses through GCE scholarships are now bringing their 60 students into Learning Circles, teams of 6-8 teachers and their classes from around the world who work together on a project for a set period of time. Having gained so much from their exposure to collaborative project based learning, they discussed their experience at a round table discussion at the Azerbaijan English Teachers Association (AzETA) weekly meeting. By talking about the new skills both they and their students gained from the collaborative learning, they recruited 2 new teachers to use the GCE scholarships for online professional development through iEARN this Spring.
GCE teachers and their students have been especially active in the YouthCaN project in the month of February. The Green Way Club of Ismaillil has students working on several environmental issues. The students tested the quality of water and documented other forms of pollution in the area, and then presented their findings to local authorities.
GCE teachers conducted trainings for primary school students on how to keep the environment clean and led campaigns to clean up the schoolyard and local parks. Peace Corps volunteers have been instrumental in helping to implement these projects in this remote region where English language skills are lacking for communicating with their peers in the iEARN online forums.
Three iEARN alumni presented the GCE program to 20 schools in Baku at the Enjoy English Club (EEC) Annual Conference hosted by AzETA on February 3, 2008. The alumni discussed their involvement in the projects and how their participation helped qualify them for exchange programs in the U.S., particularly by helping them improve their English skills. The alumni were able to demonstrate the positive impact of the GCE on students by sharing the firsthand benefits of global education programs.
iEARN Project Book Translated Into Azeri
Thanks to the GCE program, iEARN-Azerbaijan was able to translate the iEARN project book into the Azeri language. This resource contains descriptions of all the active projects and gives educators a sense of the many opportunities available to become involved in collaborative learning projects with their peers around the world.
The project book can be located at:
http://www.iearn.org/projects/projectbook.html
GCE Motivating Students and Teachers to Succeed
Students at the Khawla School have been active in the Folk Costumes Around the Globe project, in which students share photos and drawings of traditional clothing from their countries and write about the occasions on which they are worn. In this way, students learn visually from other students about different cultures and become more aware of their own culture as well.
Bahraini students have been uploading photos and drawings with an accompanying written description to create a virtual repository of Bahrain’s folk costumes so that their peers can learn more about Bahrain. One group of girls brought costumes to school and took photos of each other dressed up, while another group visited the Bahrain National Museum to take photos of the folk costumes in the exhibits there. With the goal of teaching others about their culture, Bahraini students took an active role in their own learning about their own society in the past and present.
The same has been true of the students at the Al Omran Boys’ School who are busy working on the My Hero and My Country project with their peers from the USA, in which they exchange information about their national heroes and country while using their English language skills in a meaningful context. The English Language Senior Teacher at the school recently presented to the school’s English Club about how to work with the GCE program.
The online professional development course scholarships have been an especially successful component of the GCE program in Bahrain. English teachers Momen El-Sayed and Masooma Khalil, who were both involved in the last session, wrote about being exposed to “new ideas and theories of teaching” while learning from the experiences of “lovely teachers around the world”, and how learning about “other students from another culture” and the ability to “give their opinions on very important issues that relate to their lives” has been a “very important factor in increasing the students’ motivation. Their positive experiences have inspired others to take advantage of the scholarships for the current session.
GCE Alumni Training Attended by DAS from ECA
Sixteen alumni and four teachers participated in a two-day GCE alumni training workshop at the iEARN-Egypt offices. The training was conducted by Ms. Ebtihal Taha, Trainer and General Manager of ELIXIR, Ms. Aliaa Khalil, Trainer and Program Specialist in Business Development at iEARN Egypt, and Ms. Yasmina Helmy, Program Specialist at iEARN Egypt. The trainers worked with alumni to improve their writing skills, build fundraising and proposal writing skills, and develop reporting skills so that they will be able to submit and carry out proposals for the GCE Alumni Mini-Grants.
Ms. Alina Romanowski, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Office of Professional and Cultural Exchanges, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs visited the training and met with the Egyptian GCE alumni and teachers. They introduced themselves and talked about their experience with the GCE program and the difference it has made in their lives through their work with iEARN. Shimaa Salem, of Cairo University, called the experience her “window for the Globe” that helps her to learn about different cultures, but more importantly “it gives me a golden chance to have friends around the World.”
Ms. Romanowski took questions from the workshop participants and talked to them about the many opportunities available to the in the immediate and distant future through Department of State programs. The students particularly enjoyed learning that President Nicolas Sarzkozy of France, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK, and President Anwar El Sadat of Egypt all participated in the International Visitor Leadership (IV) Program. At the end of her visit Ms. Romanowski was presented with a silver plate and a painting about peace as a token of appreciation for all of the ECA’s support and encouragement over the years.
iEARN-Indonesia
GCE Promotes Community Service Towards Natural Disaster Preparedness
Fifteen students and their teacher from the secondary school SMA 1 in Padang organized and carried out a community service project aimed at preparing the young to face natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Padang is located on the western coast of the island of Sumatra, which is often the site of earthquakes and suffered staggering losses of life from the tsunami in December of 2004.
The GCE workshop was held at the Baitul Rahman Institution on February 3, 2008, and was attended by over 50 children and their teachers from 3 local elementary schools. The 15 student volunteers distributed pamphlets they had created with information about ways to prepare for and react to natural disasters.
They broke the children into small groups and went over the information, especially as it relates to earthquakes and tsunamis, and answered questions. In these same groups the children made safety maps showing where they will go in the event of an earthquake or tsunami, and then presented their work to all the other groups.
The children enjoyed learning from their older peers, and the information they learned will help prevent the needless loss of life when natural disasters strike.
GCE Classroom Sharing Experience With War & Learning From Others
Students at the Hawler Typical School in Kurdistan, in a city where thousands were killed by biological weapons in past years, are working with their English teacher on the Machinto–Do You Hear the Little Bird Crying? project. The 25 eighth grade boys and girls began participating in the project at the beginning of December and are still actively involved, having made connections with schools all over the world who are interested in learning about their stories. At the same time, the Iraqi students are learning about the effects of war, past and present, in other parts of the world.
Based on the picture book Machinto and the exhibit catalogue “They Still Draw Pictures, Children’s Art in Wartime,” all participants read these works and discuss their reactions with their peers around the world. Students also research the wars have taken place in modern times, and where armed conflict continues to destroy the lives of children. They learn about these areas where war threatens civilian lives creating innocent victims. They learn about the consequences of war, and discuss what we can do together to prevent them. The project results in students making their own picture books.
iEARN-Israel
GCE School Creates Mural Showcasing a Multicultural Jerusalem
Students at a GCE primary school for girls in Jerusalem have designed and created a mural showcasing Jerusalem’s multiculturalism as part of iEARN’s Art Miles project, in which students design and create murals that promote education, culture, and/or environmental preservation. The murals made all around the world will be sewn together and displayed at the “Exhibition of the Century” gala in Egypt in 2010.
The students’ mural is 12 feet long by 5 feet high and features a panoramic view of the old city surrounded by the wall with holy places from the city’s three major religions and other famous sights of the city, as well as traditional clothes, tools, foods, art, and celebrations.
New GCE Website For Teddy Bear Project in Jerusalem
iEARN-Israel has created a website in English and Arabic for teachers and students working on the Teddy Bear project as part of the GCE program. The Teddy Bear project aims to foster tolerance and an understanding of cultures other than your own; classrooms from different countries partner up and send each other a teddy bear, which emails home diary messages (written by the students) describing its experiences in the new culture. The website can be found at:
http://www.markazedu.net/Default.aspx?tabid=86
The website showcases the project by allowing participating classrooms to upload photos, videos, and information about their schools and the activities they participate in. It also provides a space for students to share what they have learned about another culture from the diary messages their teddy bear sends home from abroad. There are currently 6 classrooms from Jerusalem working on the site in addition to their regular collaboration with their partner classrooms in the online forums.
iEARN-Lebanon
GCE Media Course Spawns Press Clubs in High Schools
Twelve students at HHS II from grades 10 & 11 joined a Press Club that was created this February to give students the experience of producing news content themselves and a better understanding of journalism in general. The idea for the club was the byproduct of an 8-week online professional development course for teaching media journalism that Ms. Maysa’ Banat and Ms. Nisrine Awarke are enrolled in with iEARN-Lebanon through the GCE program.
The club was officially launched on February 13, 2008 when the students met as a team with their teachers and worked out what they hoped to accomplish. They decided they wanted to learn how to design and maintain a class blog, produce an authentic newsletter, and collaborate to create an online media center. The Press Club will discuss various aspects of the media and its influence, as well as what it says about a society.
Here is an excerpt of what the class wrote about freedom of the press:
“Most people feel the freedom of the press is very important. It means that the press is free in saying, writing, or expressing any ideas about anything. Where there is no freedom of the press, people are often not informed about the truth. Governments can use newspapers for their own propaganda and can censor opinions and facts that they don’t want people to read about. But, in some cases, the newspapers themselves do not tell the truth about what is happening. They sometimes try to affect people’s opinions, and newspaper reports can be biased. In some countries, it can seem as if the press has too much freedom. Famous people feel that newspapers are intrusive and print too much about their lives.”
The students’ group blog can be viewed at: juniorjournalists.blogspot.com
The online course that the teachers are taking was created to enable teachers to explore the impact of the media and integrate a new media project into their classes to enhance student learning through the creation of a group news blog. The teachers are trained to introduce basic journalism skills, media ethics, writing and editing interviewing, photography, and media literacy skills into the curriculum or media clubs. The course was launched with a face-to-face workshop on January 25, 2008.
iEARN-Morocco
GCE Program Collaborates With RELO To Send Teachers to International Conferences
Regional English Language Officer (RELO), Ruth Petzold, is sponsoring GCE teacher Mohamed Chouki to attend the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Washington, DC and the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) conference in New York in late March and early April. In addition, iEARN-Morocco will sponsor GCE teacher Nour-Eddine Laouni to attend the TESOL conference in New York. These two GCE English teachers in Morocco will bring the skills they acquire at these conferences back to their students and fellow teachers.
The GCE program in Morocco is actively promoting English language education through iEARN’s online collaborative projects that allow students to use their language skills to participate in meaningful projects in every subject area.
The RELO has been very supportive of iEARN-Morocco’s other efforts in this area such as the Students Unlimited project and the English Access Microscholarship (ACCESS) program. The ACCESS program gives non-elite 14- to 18-year-old students the opportunity to study English and participate in enrichment activities designed to improve their appreciation for American democratic principles, civic engagement, history, culture and values taught in an accurate and responsible manner while aiming to enhance their educational and employment opportunities and strengthen their ability to contribute to the development of their societies.
iEARN-Oman
Cultural Exchange Generates Interest in GCE Program
Students received a box of American cultural items this month in response to the box of items they sent the previous month. The box included letters for all of the Omani students from their American friends in Westborough, MA and American cultural items that created great interest in the students and teachers, who are eager to get involved in other collaborative projects.
Aside from the letters, the box contained items such as a cereal box, music, a newspaper, magazine, a visitor’s guide from their town, and a baseball among many other things.
The excitement from this GCE project soon spread as schools from the surrounding area came to visit the class to see the box of cultural items from the US. Many of these visitors also decided they would like to be involved in GCE’s cultural exchange projects!
iEARN-Pakistan
GCE Workshop Promotes Technology in Education
Seventeen teachers from multiple schools in Karachi and Hyderabad participated in a training workshop titled “Digital Imaging Across Curriculum” at the iEARN-Pakistan office in Karachi on February 9, 2008. The teachers learned many innovative methods to integrate digital photography tools into their curriculum through creative projects that enhance students’ learning.
The teachers were also walked through several collaborative art projects that are greatly enhanced by these tools such as Eye to Eye, Global Art: A Sense of Caring, Cultural Recipe, Side by Side, Folk Costumes, and One Day in the Life: Digital Diary. The workshop provided teachers with hands on experience using digital cameras, basic photography skills, using image-editing software, using a scanner, and sharing their digital images through an online collaborative project.
Two partnerships with U.S. schools were formed as a direct result of this workshop. The Beacon House School Cliftan Campus will be working on the One Day in the Life: Digital Diary project with Mills Pond Elementary School in New York and the Al-Murtaza School in Karachi will be working on the Eye to Eye project with a class in Seattle, Washington.
GCE Workshop Cements New GCE Partnership
Samah Al-Jundi, Country Coordinator for Syria, conducted an iEARN Introduction for five English teachers at the Rawafed Center in Zabadani on February 15, 2008. The Rawafed Center offers remedial classes to students finding it difficult to keep up with the school curriculum and has entered into a partnership with the iEARN in Syria. Zabadani is on the outskirts of Damascus, and the Rawafed Center attracts many students to its English courses in the summer when the town’s population swells with people who come to stay the three months of summer there.
Four English teachers from the Rawafed Center, an Arabic language teacher at a government school, and the former principal of a school in Damascus who was interested in learning more about the program attended the workshop. The educators were joined together by a shared belief that simply following the standard course of instruction was failing the students, and were looking for something that could enhance their students’ learning.
Ms. Al-Jundi saw an opportunity for the GCE program to help and arranged for the workshop to train the teachers in project based learning techniques. The educators were also introduced to the online forums where their classrooms will be able to collaborate with their peers from the U.S. and other countries around the world. This interaction will provide the students with meaningful opportunities to use their English skills and learn about other cultures as they work together on various projects.
The participants will be exploring the Teacher’s Forum in iEARN’s Collaboration Centre and interacting with their fellow educators from around the world until a follow up workshop is conducted for them on March 1, 2008. The educators will then begin working on the topic of Diplomacy Through Technology in the Day in the Life project forum’s Photo Diaries. In this project students interact by posting descriptions of typical and celebratory days in their life and share captioned autobiographical photographs with their peers around the world.
iEARN-Uzbekistan
First GCE Training in Uzbek Language Conducted
More than 20 teachers from 3 schools and representing 6 subject areas participated in a two-day GCE workshop in Karshi titled “Integration of ICT in the Learning Process” organized by iEARN-Uzbekistan’s trainer, Irina Mavlanova, and an alumnus of the U.S. State Department’s Teaching Excellence & Achievement (TEA) program, Evgeniy Rahmatullaev, from February 22-23, 2008.
The workshop was held in the computer lab of the “Nuristan” Academic Lyceum and was the opening session of the iEARN Teachers Academy, which was formed with the help of the Karshi City Department of Education and the “Nuristan” Academic Lyceum for the purpose of expanding the use of educational technologies in the region. During the two-day GCE workshop, the participants learned how to effectively use computers and the internet in a classroom setting, were introduced to project based learning, and shown how to integrate iEARN’s collaborative projects into the curriculum to make use of their newly acquired skills.
This workshop was a breakthrough for the GCE program in Uzbekistan as it was the first time a training was conducted in the Uzbek language and involved teachers from the rural areas where Uzbek is used in the schools.
The GCE program will continue to reach out and make inroads to this underserved community. When the teachers have “graduated” from the Teachers Academy, each of the participants is expected to organize at least 5 professional development sessions in Uzbek for the rural schools of the region.
GCE School Receives 2008 CSIET Global Classroom Award
The Council on Standards for International Educational Travel (CSIET) presented 1 of 3 Global Classroom Awards to GCE school Metropolitan Learning Center Interdistrict Magnet School for Global and International Studies (MLC) in Bloomfield, CT at their 1st Annual National School Conference on International Youth Exchange in Indianapolis, Indiana from February 28-29, 2008. MLC has been involved in GCE since 2003.
This award recognizes far-sighted educators and high schools that enthusiastically participate in international exchanges and have demonstrated their commitment to promoting global understanding and international education. The 3 winning schools each received a $500 scholarship for one of its students to study abroad or for increasing school-wide international awareness.
MLC participated in 5 international exchanges through the GCE program from 2003-2005, hosting students from Pakistan, Morocco, and Egypt, and sending students to Egypt.
Students continue to benefit from the GCE program through virtual exchanges in iEARN’s Collaboration Centre, where students work on projects with their peers from GCE countries as well as many others around the world.
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