Facilitate a project

Once you have made contacts in iEARN and are familiar with how the projects are conducted on the forums, these are the suggested steps for developing your own project:
Announce your idea by posting it to the Teachers' Forum . This is to generate discussion and possible collaboration on the actual design of the project, and to see if there are other people interested in the topic.

Once you find other people who are interested in joining the project, fill out the Project Idea Template Form below, and email it to projects@us.iearn.org.

iEARN Coordinators will help to find an online forum for your project to take place in, and will indicate this on #14 of the Project Template. If your project will not take place on a forum, and will be a small email exchange, for example, the posting will indicate this and tell people who to contact.

Once your project has been posted in and assigned to a project forum, it should also be posted as a topic on the online forum in which it will be happening. You can do this yourself, or get help from the iEARN Coordinators at projects@us.iearn.org.

Occasionally post responses to your topic on so that people know whether it is ongoing or ended, whether you are still looking for participants, etc. Project facilitators are strongly encouraged to update their original announcement by posting news of the project as responses to the original announcement. Send the updates to newsflash@us.iearn.org as well, so that we can put them in the newsflash. This is especially important if most of your project is taking place over email and not on an online forum where it is visible to the full iEARN community.

New Project Template

1. Name of Project:
   
2. Brief one-sentence description of project:
   
3. Full description of project:
   
4. Age/level of project participants:
   
5. Timetable/Schedule for the project:
   
6. Possible project/classroom activities:
   
7. Expected outcomes/products:
   
8. Project contribution to others and the planet:
   
9. Project language(s):
   
10. Curriculum area:
    
11. Names/email of initial participating groups:
    
12. Name of facilitator(s):
    
13. Email of facilitator(s):
    
14. iEARN Forum where it will take place or is taking place (leave blank if uncertain, and you will be assigned to a forum):
    
15. WWW page of project (not required):
    Send by email to projects@us.iearn.org.

Suggestions for Successful Project Facilitation

• Use on-line forums instead of direct e-mail whenever possible. Forums accommodate a variety of school schedules by archiving messages and allowing new contributors to see the project’s progression, who is involved, and whether the work is of interest. And, by using the iEARN forums, you are enabling participants to participate by e-mail, www, or off-line news-reader, thus keeping costs to a minimum. For more about these 3 options for accessing the iEARN forums, see http://www.iearn.org/forums.html . As project facilitators, most of you are subscribed to your project forum's email distribution list (iearn-xxxx@us.iearn.org) so that you see when new messages are posted. If you aren't subscribed, please be sure to monitor your forum regularly via WWW or news reader.
  
  
• Encourage discussion and interaction among participants in your project's online forum. iEARN projects are meant to be collaborative and interactive. As a project facilitator, part of your role, and that of your students, is to respond to inquiries about your project, to monitor your project's forum, and to facilitate interaction among participants. This increases the opportunities for students to receive feedback on their writing, so that responsibility for responding to messages doesn’t just fall on the project facilitators. Our goal is that every student who posts a message will receive a response. This can be attained if people respond to 2 other messages for every new one that they post.
  
  
• Involve participating schools and students in leadership roles.  Appointing international student editors and facilitators as partners to your own students not only provides additional sources of feedback to contributors, but it also helps other students to see ways that they can take leadership roles within the project. Participants may even choose to share the role of compiling project materials into a final publication, thus allowing a variety of classrooms the experience of analyzing and presenting a piece of the project's "final product."
  
  
• Post updated project information to your forum periodically. This way, participants aren't referring to outdated information. Project updates should be posted as responses to the original announcement in your project forum, and can also be sent to newsflash@us.iearn.org for inclusion in the twice monthly online iEARN newsletter, "iEARN in Action."
  
  
• Participate in another project, or monitor other projects that might also benefit from the work in your project. Share what you are doing on other forums where appropriate. This is a great way to meet other participants, and learn about the many projects initiated by teachers and students throughout the world.