The need for students to improve their intercultural awareness and understanding of international events is continually growing today. Living in a world where thousands of children are still dying of hunger and related diseases and pollution is a vital problem of the 21st century, stundents all over the world have to know that they are able to make a meaningful difference in the health and welfare of people around the globe and they must work together for a better life in the future.
Thanks to telecommunications, the barriers between the developing countries and the developed ones have fallen down and opened the way to a global community.
I*EARN (the International Education and Resource Network) is a global telecommunications network that links a lot of schools from different parts of the world and it must become part of the ongoing educational process. That's why students working in collaboration with their teachers design and implement network projects, which fall into four subject areas:
Working in I*EARN projects is a way to learn taking advantage of the capacity of the human brain in learning from vast amounts of information; the human brains is able to establish relationships among disciplines through its capacity of recognizing and organizing the information with the previously acquired knowledge.
An efficient model of learning in I*EARN are Learning Circles, a way of grouping students and teachers into international teams and supporting each teacher/class group in a Circle to develop global projects around a shared theme. Learning Circles are highly interactive, reciprocal teaching and learning environments in which projects created by each class become the work of the Circle. The shared task is to create a publication that collects or summarizes the Circles Projects. The coordinator of this efficient model of learning is Mrs. Margaret Riel and for more details on Learning Circles go to: http://www.igc.apc.org/iearn/circles/riel.html Learning Circles are project - based partnerships among small number of schools located throughout the world. Each session lasts 14 weeks and in order to join a Learning Circle the students must be I*EARN members and complete a placement form two weeks before the beginning of the session. A few lines should be told here about the structure of the Learning Circles:
Computer Chronicle (journalism) Mind Works (creative writing) Places and Perspectives (history/geografy)
There are also three levels according to the students' age:
Elementary (grades 3 - 6) Middle (grades 6 - 9) High School (grades 9 - 12)
Currently all circles are in Engish. I'm going to share with you our first experience on Learning Circles, trying to follow all the phases we have gone through.
The schedule for 1997 - 1997 began in September with the first session, that lasted until January 1997 and the second session started in February and finishes in May 1997.
I'm going now to describe this experience in Learning Circles, which proved to be a real success and the students enjoyed participating in it. After all the schools which wanted to participate in this Circle sent the placement forms, the Circle could begin and the News Flashes announced us that the first phase, Getting Ready, might begin. That was supposed to be the first week, 23.09 - 30.09, when all the teachers involved had to log on to I*EARN, read the Teacher's Guide and introduce the concept of Learning Circles to their students. This was the time when the teachers had to explain their students what was going to take place in the Learning Circles and to make them understand that they were responsible for the success of the Circle. All the messages sent to the Circle were saved in a conference that might be checked by everybody in order to see if they had received all the messages. The next phase, Opening the Circle, was in fact the real beginning of the Circle's interaction. It lasted from 30.09 to 11.10 and during that period the classes logged on and responded to Electronic Roll Call. All the teachers in the Circle had to send an introductory message to the on - line Learning Circle conference. This was the time when I introduced myself to my Circle partners and, together with my students, prepared the class survey and also the school and community ones. All these were sent to the Circle conference and we could find out a lot of things about all the participants, about their schools and communities. It was a very good opportunity for my students to see how students from other parts of the world lived, what they studied, what their hobbies were or how they used to spend their spare time. They could also learn new and real things about places they had studied during their geography classes and the ways of living in those places. They were pleasantly surprised to see that teenagers there used to have the same hobbies and liked the same music and sports as they did. Thus, they could discover that youth are alike all over the world, having the same dreams, regardless their race, religion or nationality and they could also understand better what the main idea of I*EARN: "Youth making a meaningful difference in the world" was supposed to mean. Also, in this phase of the Circle, the students had to prepare and send the "Welcome Packs". They were supposed to contain pictures, postcards illustrating their community, stamps, paintings, small souvenirs, photos, maps, drawings or whatever the students wanted to send in order to make their partners know them better. The "Welcome Packs" were mailed to postal addresses. The next two weeks, 13.10 - 25.10, were supposed to be the period for the following phase, named Planning the Learning Circles Projects. During this period, the teachers involved in the Circle had to discuss the projects they were going to sponsor. Each class selected a section to sponsor and sent a message to the conference, describing the information they needed to receive for their project. Our project was "Vlad Tepes Alias Dracula" and our partners were very interested in finding out things about Dracula from the very country he was supposed to belong to. Our target was to clarify the story of Dracula, to let them know where this name came from and to underline the historical importance of Vlad Tepes and his connection with the legendary Dracula. The students worked very hard on gathering the materials and they read a lot about Vlad Tepes, in fact, we had read together all the books thad had been published in our country about this topic so far. All my students brought their contributions to this projects and when they finished their work they were very proud of what they had achieved. We also sent a lot of contributions to the other participants' projects and everybody seemed very satisfied about the perfect cooperation between the teams. Of course we got contributions to our project from the other participants too, but, unfortunately, my students were a little disappointed about the quality of the materials they had got, compared to what they had sent for the others' projects. The process of exchanging the students' works took place between 28.10 - 06.12 and then followed the next phase, that of Organising the Circle Publication. That meant a lot of work both for students and me, as we had to select, evaluate and edit the articles we had received for our project. I used to work with them in the lab in order to layout and print our section of the Circle publication and that happened between 09.12 - 20.12.'96. After that phase all the students were on winter holiday and when we returned to school, we entered the last phase, that of Closing the Circle, which took place between 06.01 - 20.01. The teachers and their students used to send their final good - bye mails to the conference and the Circle closed.
We were the first to make our project an electronic magazine, that can be
seen at the following address:
http://lcjdap.soroscj.ro/Vlad_Tepes_Dracula/frontp.html
Besides an enormous work we also had great satisfactions and we dared to continue our activity in Learning Circles projects, so we subscribed to the next Circle that had been planned for this school year. We have now a lot of experience but I really think we'll need it, as there are nine teams involved in the Circle this time. We decided to sponsor a project entitled "Famous People In My Country" and the reason we thought to chose this topic for our project was to make our culture and civilisation known to people who certainly know too little about us. This circle is supposed to close by the 20th of May and then there is a break until September. As a conclusion, I want very much to underline the importance of communication, of exchanging information among students and opinions among teachers and most of all I would like to express my great joy that my students have improved a lot their English, which really means a lot both for them and for me as a teacher of English.
Cornelia Platon - teacher of English
" Alexandru Papiu Ilarian " Highschool DEJ
E-Mail: nelly@lcjdap.soroscj.ro
WWW: http://lcjdap.soroscj.ro/~nelly/