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International Education and Resource Network (iEARN)iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) is a K-12 network of 20,000 teachers and 1 million students in over 100 countries interacting in 29 languages. The goal of iEARN is to enhance learning by engaging students in online interactive, curriculum-based projects. iEARN was founded in 1988 by a former teacher who saw the need for students all over the world to work collaboratively as part of the educational process. Since that time iEARN has been training teachers to adopt new teaching methodologies by using technology to meet the requirements of the curriculum and promote critical thinking and global awareness. For iEARN the power of the Internet is in its potential to allow students to learn with other cultures, rather than about selected them. Since it’s origin as a pilot project among a small group of schools in Moscow and New York State during the last years of the Cold War, iEARN has seen a dramatic increase in participation. In April 2001 iEARN developed five subject-specific online courses designed to bring American teachers into a learning community with peers around the world to integrate a standards-based collaborative project into their classroom. After the success of the pilot iEARN began to offer the courses twice a year as part of its teacher professional development program. Courses typically enroll 20-25 educators in 6-7 countries and focuses on one of the following areas and focus on subject areas including Creative Arts; Language Arts/Creative Writing; Social Studies/Contemporary Affairs/Geography; Science/Environment/Math; English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language. Over a recent three year period iEARN trained 431 teachers who all together have brought collaborative learning projects to their 17,240 students.
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