Presentations to Colleagues/Administrators/Parents

iEARN Professional Development

Face-to-Face Workshop Toolkit

There is no single formula for designing an iEARN workshop. Attention should always be paid to the particular needs and interests of each participating group in determining which content and skills should be covered in a workshop.

Below are some example activities and resources you may wish to use during an iEARN workshop. Feel free to adapt the activities to fit your training goals and schedule. If you are an iEARN trainer, and would like to share some of your activities with us, we would love to hear from you! For further information, please contact us at iearn@us.iearn.org.

Icebreakers / Introduction Activities

World Figures Activity . In this activity, participants have a chance to work individually and collectively to identify the faces on a slide filled with "world" figures. Provide participants with 2-3 minutes to work alone, and then 2-3 mintues with a group of partners, and you will likely find that the opportunity to collaborate increases their individual knowledge.

"Capitalize" On It!" This activity provides a similar opportunity to demonstrate the power of collaboration, using a matching exercise involving country capitals. Participant Handout ( in Microsoft Word), Facilitator "Answer Key" ( in Microsoft Word)
[ contributed by Carrie Kochan, Technology Specialist for Montgomery County Public School System ]

Overview of iEARN

Skills and Concepts: Gaining an understanding of the vision and purpose of iEARN.

Below is a link to the "Introduction to iEARN" slide show that has been previously used in iEARN workshops. You may download the slide show, simply by clicking on the link below. Please feel free to modify the slides to update the content and tailor it to your audience.

Introduction to iEARN (in Powerpoint): A basic introduction to iEARN.

iEARN also has a number of videos that can be used as introductions to iEARN. These are available at the cost of reproducing and shipping. Contact iearn@us.iearn.org for more information about ordering copies.

• iEARN Video. Created by Sky Television with iEARN-USA. Online version available through the iEARN Canada website.
• "Get on the Net and There You Are!" (RealPlayer | Quicktime) produced by SchoolsOnline and featuring iEARN classrooms involved in collaborative environmental projects.
  

Using E-mail

Skills and Concepts: Sending and Receiving E-mail

Preparation: A week before the workshop, post a message to the Teachers forum (via newsgroup: apc.iearn.teachers) asking for iEARN participants to send greetings to the group of teachers you will be introducing to iEARN. You may also wish to write to individual iEARN teachers to ask them to send greetings.

Activity: Distribute printed copies of e-mail messages that have been sent to the group. Ask volunteers to read their messages out loud and then locate the senders on a map so that they get a feeling of the scope of the iEARN community. In some cases, more than one participant will have the same greeting message. Assign participants the task of sending their first e-mail message as a response to the message they received.

This is a good time to talk about our suggested "Pedagogy of Writing E-mail Messages" in a classroom. Using an overhead, walk through the important steps of the writing process behind published e-mail messages.

"Pedagogy of Writing E-mail Messages"
Computer e-mail is a tool that teachers and students use to share information with each other. The writing process is most successful when they write from the deep knowledge of their own rich cultural, community, and school learning experiences. The writing process includes:
1) Conversations taking place among the whole class, in small groups, or in individual teacher or student peer conferences about the experiences they wish to share on-line. Discussing a topic before putting it in print facilitates clarification of ideas and the building of rich descriptive words in a collaborative social dialogue before actual writing takes place.
2) The first draft of the e-mail message focuses first on content ideas and then on organization of ideas, on sentence syntax, and on spelling. The first draft can be typed on the computer using a word processing program.
3) The initial draft will then be shared with someone else through writing conferences with student peers and/or teachers. The author or another person can read the draft aloud with the purpose of "hearing" how the text reads. The conferencing process is an important time for clarifying meanings and talking together about the ways words could make the text more descriptive. When sending e-mail online, it is critically important to understand that you are sending language across diverse cultural contexts and without the prior opportunity to know one another face-to-face. Careful attention needs to be given to define vocabulary indigenous to a culture or context.
4) The writer does the final editing. After conferencing, the writer then does a final editing of the e-mail message with careful attention to clear sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. The spelling feature of a word processing program is an important tool for final editing.

-From "It Takes Many Village to Build a World: Honoring People and Learning"

This is also a good time to discuss the issue of avoiding "ethnocentrism" when writing in a global context. How much of what is described in the transmissions needs explanation or description for an audience from a different culture. Have proper names been explained? Foods described? Slang or colloquial terminology elucidated? Imagine how a non-native speaker of English might interpret the following sentence: " I have dirty blonde hair." This makes for interesting class discussion prior to transmission.

Move to the computers to draft individual e-mail responses to the messages. If participants do not have individual e-mail accounts yet, they may be able to use a school account, or they may want to consider setting up a free web e-mail account through a service such as hotmail, excite, etc. It is important however, if they do set up such an account, that they have access to the WWW to send and retrieve their messages in the future.

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Overview of the iEARN Website

To give participants a general sense of the kinds of resources that are available on the iEARN website, it may be helpful to start by pointing out the resources along the navigation bar at the top (Projects, Globe, News, Professional Development, About Us, Join iEARN), before you move into the interactive forums and databases on the top right. A few things to point out:

• Projects: This area of the website provides brief descriptions of the various projects currently active in iEARN. Each description also provides a link to the online forum in which the project is taking place. So, this is actually another area through which participants can link directly with the online forums.
• Globe: This area provides descriptions of the activities happening in countries active in iEARN, and whenever available, provides links to the country websites. Countries can be found either by region along the left or on the map, or can be found on the pulldown menu. In addition, this section has a link to the Language Resource page, providing links to specific language forums, websites, and resource translations.
• News: This area of the site provides a web version of the online newsletter that all members of iEARN receive twice a month by way of email. The web version has all the same content as the email version, but is missing the actual contact information of members, who may not want their email addresses distributed outside the network. This area also contains such resources as press releases, the iEARN "Interaction" hard copy newsletter, and links to articles, books, and videos about iEARN.
• Professional Development: This section, which we are in now, provides access to the iEARN handbook and Workshop Toolkit, both of which help to answer questions about getting started in iEARN, and integrating it into the curriculum, and also about organizing trainings to introduce iEARN to additional teachers and students. There is also a form for requesting information about professional development options.
• About Us: Links to the history of iEARN, FAQs, Annual Reports, Partners, Programs, Funders, as well as opportunities to request information or donate to iEARN.
• Join iEARN: Here, those who are interested in joining the network can submit an application form to iEARN-US, or for those outside the US, can contact their country coordinator directly to get involved.

Using the iEARN Forums:

If you are conducting a large training, it is always nice to post a note on the Teachers forum (via newsgroup: apc.iearn.teachers) about a week prior to the training to request greetings. This way, when you bring your workshop participants onto the forum for the first time, they will get a sense that this truly is a global community into which they are welcome.

Your group can either post their replies to these greetings individually, or you might consider posting a whole-class message as a response. A group message can even be created in a word-processing program (a facilitator can first help the group to brainstorm and list points to include in the message) and then be posted to iearn.teachers.

This exercise is a good way to get a sense of how to collaboratively write a group e-mail message that effectively reaches out beyond their local context to other schools and communities around the world. This provides an opportunity to collectively talk about issues of language in cultural exchange. How much of what is described in the transmission needs an explanation or description for an audience from a different culture? Remember that slang or colloquial language needs to be used carefully.

The group might include a short greeting, mentioning the names of their schools, the city and state or region where their schools are located, the age range of the students they teach, any special interests you and your students have, why they are interested in getting involved in iEARN, etc.

A common practice in introductions on the Teachers forum is to briefly tell about what you see when you look out the window of your school or organization, as a way to give readers a feeling for the place where they live and work. Feel free to be creative with this description. In other words, this does not have to be a literal description of what is seen from a particular window. In some cases, it might more interesting to describe a nearby scene that characterizes the environment.

After posting a group message, participants should be encouraged to continue by posting a reply to an existing message of interest on iearn.teachers.

From here, they can begin exploring the various project forums, using the iearn.ideas forum (a comprehensive listing of all the ongoing projects in the network, including project descriptions, outcomes, suggested activities, age levels, language groups, etc.), the Project pages of the website, and/or the Project Description Book as a resource for navigating the large number of active project forums.

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Finding iEARN People and Projects:

Activity 1

Skills and Concepts: Finding Projects

Resources: Project Description Book.

Activity: Participants read project description book and choose one project in which they would like to become involved. In pairs, discuss their choices and possibilities for how to incorporate such a project into what they are already doing in the classroom.

Activity 2

Skills and Concepts: Finding Projects

Activity: This activity has two parts: a "guided tour" of two projects that the facilitator will choose and further exploration of another project that's of interest to each of the participants.

Steps:

• Whole group activity: First the facilitator will take participants through a project he or she is comfortable with.
• In pairs or individually: Go to Projects section of the iEARN Collaboration Centre and look for one that is of your interest.
• While you explore the project try to imagine how you would use it in the classroom.
• Try to associate the project with learning theories and pedagogical approaches.
• Whole group discussion:
  

Activity 3

Skills and Concepts: Using the Database to find people and projects

Preparation: Explore databases beforehand to create scavenger hunt.

Activity: Scavenger hunt. Participants are led through the various functions of the database by traveling through it on a search for various people and projects. This hunt can be tailored to the particular needs and interests of each training group. One example:

People Database

1) Go to the database by clicking on the Member / Project Databases link on the upper-right side of any iEARN web page.

2) Type in your userid

3) Type in your password. (Write to https://media.iearn.org/forgot_passwd if you do not know this password)

4) Give small groups the task of finding:

-a secondary school teacher in Beijing

-a primary school teacher who has worked on a Global Art Project

-all teachers living in their home state or region

-in which country does an iEARN participant named Siriluck live?

Project Database

1) Go to the database for "Projects" on http://media.iearn.org/projects .

2) Give small groups the task of finding:

- a primary school project that deals with environmental issues

- a math project

- a Spanish-language project

- an arts project

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Using iEARN Projects in Your Classroom

Below is a link to the "Project-based Learning" slide show that has been previously used in iEARN workshops. You may download the slide show, simply by clicking on the link below. Please feel free to modify the slides to update the content and tailor it to your audience.

Project-based Learning (in Powerpoint ): A basic introduction to project-based learning, including the following components:
What is Project-based learning?
Constructivist theory
Eight features of project based learning
"Disadvantages" of PBL

Skills and Concepts: Implementing iEARN projects in the classroom.

Preparation: None

Resources: iEARN Project Template, Project Description Book, Student Publications, iEARN website.

Activity:

As background to this activity, show participants the WRITE! to Care framework by Kristi Rennebohm Franz and explore how a primary school teacher implements different projects in different content areas. This framework will not only take participants through the process of implementing curricular projects, but will also show them how the iEARN philosophy is present while students learn and act.

1) Participants group together based on discipline:

• Creative & Language Arts Projects
• Science / Environment Projects
• Math Projects
• Humanities & Social Studies Projects
• Foreign Language Teaching
• Arts
• Other

2) Participants work collaboratively to pick an existing project that will be relevant for the content area and curriculum.

3) Participants reflect on their school and classroom settings, that is: how many computers they have, when they are available, and how they can get students to receive and send messages to interact with another class outside their own school.

4) Participants design a plan imagining how they would organize their class to carry on this task. The plan may include:

• Goals
• Objectives
• Timeframe
• Classroom management/ procedures (individual student work, cooperative learning groups, whole group class work, etc.)
• Classroom techniques (brainstorming, dialogues, group presentations, role-playing, narration, problem solving, simulation, discussions, etc)
• Interaction between classes (how you will handle the e-mail exchanges, how often, who'll be in charge)
• Materials and resources they will need
• Evaluation

Sample Activities, Schedules and Presentations

• Sample Two Day iEARN Teacher Training Program , compiled by Farah Kamal, iEARN-Pakistan Coordinator
• Overview of a Sample Train-the-Trainer / Mentor Workshop , compiled by Eliane Metni, iEARN-Lebanon Coordinator (pdf)
• Introduction to iEARN (In Power Point): A basic introduction to iEARN. Please feel free to modify the slides to update the content and tailor it to your audience. Could be used to give presentations on iEARN (the audience does not necessarily have to be teachers) or at the very beginning of an iEARN teacher workshop. Includes information on the countries that participate in iEARN, the different types of projects, keys to interactive on-line project success.
• iEARN for Civic and English Language Education (In Power Point) slide show that has been previously used in iEARN workshops. Please feel free to modify the slides to update the content and tailor it to your audience. Could be used to give presentations on iEARN, Civic Education and English Language Education (the audience does not necessarily have to be teachers) or at the very beginning of an iEARN teacher workshop. Includes information on the countries that participate in iEARN, the different types of projects, keys to interactive on-line project success.

Online Courses: Integrating technology and collaborative teaching into your classroom

With support from the Longview Foundation and Copen Family Fund, iEARN's first online professional development courses completed in November 2001 have become a model for online teacher training in global education. Each course will bring together K-12 educators worldwide who wish to integrate technology into their teaching using online collaborative projects that meet their local/state/national educational standards. See http://www.iearn.org/professional/index.html


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