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April 2008
iEARN-Azerbaijan
Newly Trained GCE Teachers Conduct GCE Workshop
GCE teachers from Ganja, who were introduced to the program at iEARN-Azerbaijan’s Spring GCE Workshop in Baku, held their own GCE workshop for teachers and students in Ganja at the city’s Educational Center this April. The teachers received support from the director and staff of the center, as well as from Peace Corps Volunteers in the region. Irada Samadova, one of the GCE Country Coordinators, has been visiting Ganja regularly to conduct ESL training sessions and present the GCE program to local educators at the branch office of the English Teachers’ Association. Despite the scarcity of internet connections, and the slow speed of the connections that do exist, the GCE teachers of Ganja are extremely motivated and have been working hard to get Ganja’s students connected to students in the U.S. and around the world.
The GCE educators and students in Azerbaijan celebrated Global Youth Service Day through a variety of projects. Students worked in their schools, organized community cleanups, planted flowers, helped elderly people in their communities, and visited local orphanages. GCE students from 6 schools in Ganja gathered together on April 25, 2008 to plant 30 trees in the city. GCE teachers and students from School 164 visited a local orphanage they have been working with, bringing presents and essential supplies, as well as just spending time reading and playing with the children.
GCE Students Going the Extra Mile to Collaborate on Projects
GCE students have been working with their teacher at Isa Town Commercial School to collaborate with American students as part of the Moving Voices online course (Unsung Heroes theme). As part of this collaboration, the GCE students visited people with special needs at the Creation Center in Bahrain and interviewed them in order to make a film that tells their stories of courage and the many challenges they have overcome.
GCE students from Khawla Secondary School are collaborating with their peers in Canada and the U.S. as part of the Food For Thought project. Students started discussion about “Traditional Recipes from Bahrain” and shared 8 traditional recipes and pictures of them preparing the recipes in the online forum, and are planning to add more soon! The students organized a cooking session at the school to get the recipes and get pictures of the cooking process, and visited local spice shops to take pictures of traditional ingredients to share on the forum. At the end of the year, students are planning to collect all the recipes they have shared in a booklet to be published with a CD of the information as well. Many of the students have commented that working on the Food for Thought project has made school more interesting and relevant to them, which has resulted in their motivation to go above and beyond the project guidelines.
GCE students at Al Hedaya Al Khalifeya School are working on the My School, Your School project, which aims at making students aware of the similarities and differences in school life around the world so that they able to evaluate their own educational system in a critical way and see how they can help to improve it from their role as students. The students divided into production teams focusing on collecting information, web design (presenting the information), editing, and photography. Students read about other schools in the U.S. and other countries in the project forum and have been responding to the other students as well as posting information about their own school.
GCE Participants Take Part in Egypt’s Fourth YouthCaN Conference
Delegations of students and educators from 15 GCE schools in Alexandria, Cairo, Giza, and Monofia participated in iEARN-Egypt’s Fourth Annual YouthCaN Conference at El Sadat City School on April 7, 2008. The students presented their research on environmental issues such as global warming, clean energy, and air pollution. The GCE students also engaged in community service as part of the conference, planting trees in the local community to create awareness about the environmental challenges facing Egypt.
Other activities included interactive training sessions about recycling, painting a large mural about the environment, the composition of a song about YouthCaN, a visit to the Chinese Park in El Sadat City to observe the different plant species, and a videoconference with the YouthCaNers at the international conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Many prominent persons attended the conference, including the Governor of Monofia, the Director of Secondary Education for the Ministry of Education, the Chairman of El Sadat City, and a representative from the Ministry of Environmental Affairs among many others. The conference was also covered by OTV, a popular Egyptian satellite channel.
GCE Mini-grant Funds Educational Activities for Youth in Refugee Home
Ten students from Al-Azhar High School, who had never before been involved in any sort of community service activity, used a GCE mini-grant for $250 to organize a visit with some educational activities to a refugee home for youths in Depok on March 30, 2008. The refugee home, called the Aswain (The Braver) Timor Foundation, is for those displaced by the conflict with East Timor and houses about 50 youths from 4-16 years old in 3 rooms. The youths are completely dependent on NGOs, the government, and charities for all of their activities and educational fees.
The GCE students showed a film about global warming and led a discussion about the issue, including what they can do to have a positive impact on the environment. This led into a discussion about the 3 Rs of recycling, particularly how students can reuse things that they would normally throw away as garbage. The 10 GCE students then led the youths of the refugee home in two activities that taught them to make use of “garbage” as well as produce products to earn additional income.
The first activity was “Painting Bottles.” The youth took glass bottles, filled them with sand, and used the bottle as a canvas upon which to paint and include messages about issues important to them. Many of the youth in the refugee home put a message about how to protect the environment, while others put their dreams for the future, such as “No War.”
The second activity was about how to create colorful pins out of the plastic casings of markers. The GCE students taught the youth to break apart the colored plastic from old discarded markers into small pieces, put a mix of colored pieces into a spoon, melt the plastic together by holding the spoon over the flame of a candle, place the pin into the melted plastic, and then to remove it after it has cooled for a couple of minutes.
The youth at the refugee home enjoyed the activities and getting to spend time with other youth their age. The day concluded with the youth of the refugee home sharing some folksongs with the GCE students, who then presented them with a soccer ball, something the youth had been wanting for a long time.
The GCE students were sad when they had to leave, but they also had the joy of having made new friends and knowing they had done something good for others. The first experience of community service for these 10 GCE students from the Al-Azhar School was successful, and they all want to return to the refugee home and continue their service there.
GCE Students and Teachers Celebrate Earth Day and GYSD
GCE students and teachers from the Agriculture Bakrajo Secondary School in the city of Sulemany participated in a combined Earth Day and Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) environmental activity on April 22, 2008. The two teachers and their students visited the public spaces and parks around the city presenting on the importance of a clean environment and the ways that people can improve the environment around them. The GCE students and teachers also posted signs and flyers with advice about how everybody can do their part to save the planet.
GCE Students Interview Hero
As part of the My Hero project, 5 GCE students in grade 6 conducted an interview with author of short stories Mahmoud Shukair and posted information about the experience to a website created to share their work. The My Hero project is interdisciplinary and challenges students to make a positive difference in the world by recognizing the heroes around them as well as the heroic attributes within themselves.
The students were all girls, Nawal, Tamara, Ikhlas, Isra, and Suheir, and chose Mr. Shukair because they enjoy his writing. He is from the same village that they live in, Al Sawahreh, and they hope to be successful in their lives as he has in his. The GCE students researched the author, asking family members about him and searching the internet as well as his books, and then arranged an interview with the help of their headmistress.
On the day of the interview, Mr. Shukair welcomed the students into his home and answered all of their questions. In addition to getting to meet and interview their hero, these students gained self-confidence and valuable experience in research from this project.
For more information about work of these 5 GCE students and for a link to the video of their interview, please visit http://www.sawahrehgirls.net/Default.aspx?tabid=157.
GCE Classroom Integrates Community Service Into Curriculum
Ten GCE students in grade 9 and their science teacher at the Al Uhkuwah School have started working on a community service project fixing up a piece of land in front of their school as part of the Students Unlimited project, which empowers students to take action on important issues through community service projects and instills values such as citizenship, leadership, creativity, generosity, and collaboration. These GCE students are clearing and cleaning the land as well as planting olive trees and some seasonal flowers. While the main purpose of the project is to help the environment, their teacher has also integrated this project into their study about the growth of plants as they plant and maintain the land by the school.
GCE Students and Teachers Participate in Seventh Annual YouthCaN Med Conference
GCE educators and students have been working on the YouthCaN Med project since January of 2008, and all their work culminated in YouthCaN Med’s Seventh Annual Conference hosted by iEARN-Lebanon at the American Community School in Beirut on April 7, 2008. The theme of this year’s conference was “H2O: Helping Ocean Habitats.” Students and educators from 17 schools across Lebanon presented their projects, which focus on a wide range of issues including: the 2007 forest fires in Lebanon, cell phones, road safety, poaching, planting trees, water conservation, global warming, as well as many others.
YouthCaN Med is an offshoot of YouthCaN, an international project that enhances understanding of environmental, social, and civic education issues and empowers youth to take action. YouthCaN students facilitate an online network of students and share the environmental issues facing their communities along with what they are doing about them in iEARN’s online forums. A youth planning committee coordinates this annual event that brings the youth of the world together to share their work on environmental projects.
Since April of 2002, iEARN-Lebanon has held six annual YouthCaN Med conferences for approximately 400 Lebanese youth presenting an average of 26 interactive workshops. Youth delegations from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and the U.S. have participated in the past.
This year the conference began with videoconferences with the YouthCaNers in Slovenia and the USA. The Director General of the Ministry of Education attended the conference and voiced his support for the program as well as his wish that all public schools will be able to participate in this or other collaborative programs in the future. The conference was supported and sponsored by Lebanon’s Ministry of Education, the Hariri Foundation, the Kamel Youssef Jaber Cultural Center in Nabatieh, the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, USAID, iEARN-USA, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The YouthCaN Med conference was covered by The Daily Star and the article can be found at: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=90865
GCE Students Showcase Work at National Forum
iEARN-Morocco (MEARN) brought together 70 GCE students and 70 GCE teachers from 11 GCE schools throughout Morocco to present the community service projects they implemented in their regions as part of the Students Unlimited project at MEARN’s third National Forum from March 31–April 4, 2008 in Ifrane. The Students Unlimited project empowers students to take action on important issues through community service projects and instills values such as citizenship, leadership, creativity, generosity, and collaboration.
In Morocco, the project was funded by the RELO, USAID, and MEARN to empower youth and engage students in geographically diverse areas of the country in collaborative projects. The participating students and teachers have been collaborating online with students and educators from all over world who are also working on community service projects. Beginning in September of 2007, students and teachers were trained to use iEARN’s online Collaboration Center to talk about project development issues such as design, implementation, management, and assessment. Throughout the past academic year, students have been working on their projects and sharing their work as well as benefiting from input received from all over the world in the online collaborative forums. In addition, iEARN-Morocco dedicated funds to a small grants competition that assisted students in carrying out their community service projects.
The community service projects that students presented at the National Forum focused on the following issues: special needs kids, child labor, reformatory and rehabilitation centers, school outcasts, model schools, visiting homes for old people, drug abuse among youth, illiteracy among women, school dropout in rural areas, smoking, and sustainable development.
The final phase of the project will include a presentation at iEARN’s International Youth Summit in Uzbekistan and a student-produced English-language publication about the rewards of developing and implementing service projects in their communities.
Educator Discovers New World of Learning Through GCE Program
GCE English teacher Mbarek Akaddar completed iEARN’s online Moving Voices course this month with a GCE scholarship and found the experience to be of tremendous benefit to both him and his students. Moving Voices is an interdisciplinary project that integrates digital video-making into the curriculum and teaches related technical skills.
In the online Moving Voices course educators learn the skills for making digital movies in a secure, supportive, collaborative, and highly interactive online environment with educators from around the world. In his final paper for the class, Mr. Akaddar wrote about the transformation he saw in his classroom as he tried out a project-based learning approach.
When he first told his students they would be making a movie over the coming weeks, it was so far removed from what they normally did in school that they didn’t believe him. Mr. Akaddar didn’t have access to the necessary equipment for the project at the school and the students thought it would just be another boring programme to be involved in. It was difficult to get these jaded students interested in the project.
He showed them some examples of films that had been made by students as part of the Moving Voices project and then was able to get some of the students to meet after school in an internet café, which was a difficult situation for some of the female students. Some of the students had little or no experience with computers, but once they could see what they had the opportunity to become involved in, the students became enthusiastic about making the effort to see the project succeed.
Mr. Akaddar found that the students truly became engaged in discussing and researching ideas for what their film should focus on. He even found himself becoming engaged in a new way as “my students and me played new roles as partners in learning rather than knowledge giver and knowledge taker.” Even greater surprises lay in store as the class continued with the project.
According to Mr. Akaddar, “the most strikingchange concerned the class discipline.” This class had been one of his worst, with unmotivated, poorly behaved, and often absentee students. Yet “with this class, absenteeism and bad behaviour diminished remarkably when the class got engaged in the project!”
As the project went on, the class almost came to run itself, with Mr. Akaddar feeling more like a participant than the leader. Not only has participating in the Moving Voices project motivated his students so that they are learning far more, but “this project has positively changed the relationship between my students and me.” Even though the course is now over, he plans to continue working on the project with his class and looks forward to being able to do the project with other classes in the future. The video he and his students produced was called “The Story of a Source” and focuses on the importance of protecting sources of freshwater.
Though Mr. Akaddar faced, and continues to face, great difficulties in terms of access to computers for his students, he went the extra mile to find a way to make the project work and get his students involved. Now he is trying to share his discovery with his peers. Mr. Akaddar successfully lobbied to have the theme of the upcoming regional conference of the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English be on collaborative and project-based learning.
GCE School Hosts “English Week”
GCE teachers Mahmoud Al-Waili and Salim Al-Busaidi worked to organize an “English Week” event consisting of 6 days of activities promoting the learning of English at the Osama Bin Zaid School in Adam from April 15-22, 2008.
During the week of activities, GCE students from the school presented the GCE program and hosted an exhibition of their GCE work. Some of the other activities included: presentations about the opportunities to study English at the University level, exhibitions attended by the local Shura (Parliament) Representative as well as other special guests, online chats with other schools, environment awareness campaigns, and safety training to prepare the school in the event of an emergency.
There was also an opening and closing ceremony, at which certificates were presented to participants and prizes given to the winners of the quiz competitions that were held each morning to reinforce students’ learning. GCE students and teachers in the English Club also worked together to write up press releases about the events to distribute to the local media in both English and Arabic.
U.S. and Pakistan See “Eye to Eye”
GCE teacher Sadia Kazmi and her students in grade 6 at the Al Murtaza School in Karachi have been collaborating with students in grade 10 at the University Preparatory School in Seattle, WA on the Eye to Eye project. The students in Pakistan drew pictures about pollution and what can be done to stop it, while the American students put together images and quotes to represent themselves in a self-portrait. All the images were uploaded to the project forum to share them with each other. It was a great opportunity for these GCE students from the U.S. and Pakistan to communicate through the images they produced and further the cause of global understanding.
Pakistani Youth Celebrate GYSD
Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) has inspired about 1,000 GCE students from almost 50 schools across Pakistan to work on community service activities focusing on a wide range of issues including: the eradication of poverty, adult education, education for women, pollution, recycling of waste material, beautification of the community, traffic problems, the importance of senior citizens, a healthy diet, cleanliness, drug abuse, and the war against terrorism, world hunger. Project reports from GYSD can be found in the forum for the CIVICS: Youth Volunteerism and Service project.
GYSD Celebrated Throughout Uzbekistan
Thirty GCE students from the Parvoz School gave up their Sunday to celebrate Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) on April 20, 2008. Students renovated the site for the summer camp “Yoshlarobod” in the village of Vodil in preparation for the coming summer’s activities. The students cleaned the grounds of the camp, planted flowers, and cleaned and fixed up the buildings on the grounds. The students also researched what people had done locally for GYSD in previous years as well as what people all over the world were planning to do in 2008 and made a presentation of their findings to inspire others to get involved this year.
The GCE Parvoz School in Fergana City conducted a GYSD week, in association with the local NGO Ecologically Clean Fergana Association, beginning on April 22, 2008. The week began with a presentation on ecological disasters in the region and the current state of the local environment by representatives from the NGO. As a result of the presentation, students volunteered to clean the City Park and local community area. There was also an essay contest on the topic “What can I do for the nature of Fergana Valley?” and an exhibition of crafts made by students from materials found in nature. All the participants in GYSD week cleaned the school and planted flowers on the grounds to conclude the GYSD week with community service on April 26, 2008.
GYSD was also celebrated with several GCE projects in Karshi, including: an exhibition of cacti (a rare plant in Uzbekistan) at School #34 organized by the students in grade 6 to inspire people to protect the environment; a 10k bicycle race organized by GCE students at the Academic Lyceum Nuristan to promote awareness of alternative transportation methods; and cleaning up the trash and planting of about 50 pine trees on the grounds of the Academic Lyceum Nuristan to replace the many that died during the exceptionally cold winter.
Edutopia Honors iEARN-USA’s Executive Director as one of the Daring Dozen in Education
The George Lucas Education Foundation’s (GLEF) magazine Edutopia named Dr. Ed Gragert one of its 2008 “Daring Dozen: Twelve who are reshaping the future of education” this April. Mr. Gragert is the Executive Director of iEARN-USA, which, as part of the global International Education and Resource Network (iEARN), implements the GCE program in a number of countries. On why Dr. Gragert was selected as one of the Daring Dozen, the GLEF noted, “Even as the most optimistic activists in education begin to feel alone and unheard in the wilderness, we find evidence that the ranks of reformers are growing and their pleas for technology integration, project learning, integrated curriculum, collaborative learning, new methods of assessment are having more impact. Gragert believes one of iEARN’s most important missions is promoting collaboration, both as a learning tool and an end in itself. To that end, iEARN’s programs focus on combining technological tools with the social, emotional, and intellectual skills that enable strong, productive teamwork. The emphasis, Gragert says, is on honoring different perspectives, incorporating different points of view, and utilizing the array of abilities an international team of students can bring to problem solving and the completion of joint projects.” Dr. Gragert is truly a leader in the field of using educational technology to connect young people and build cultural awareness and understanding, a central theme of the GCE program. The article in Edutopia can be found at: http://www.edutopia.org/edwin-gragert
American TEA Teacher Travels to Azerbaijan and Meets GCE Colleague
Nicole Boujaber-Diederichs, an American teacher from Cypress Creek High School in Orlando, Florida, visited Baku on April 4, 2008 to meet with Farida Huseynova, her GCE collaborator from School #290. Ms. Boujaber-Diederichs was in Azerbaijan as part of the Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) program.
As part of a presentation at the American Center, Ms. Boujaber-Diederichs presented her GCE project activities to 11 Azerbaijani teachers and 3 students. After sharing her experiences, challenges, and successes, she showed some of her students’ work that she had brought along.
The teachers were grateful for the opportunity to meet Ms. Boujaber-Diederichs in person after working with her and her students virtually through the GCE program. The teachers are hopeful they will get to meet face-to-face again at the Annual iEARN Conference in Uzbekistan in July 2008.
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