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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Ed Gragert, 212-870-2693
beijing@us.iearn.org
Students
Worldwide Use the Internet to Support Education of Rural Youth in
China
January, 2000.
For many adults, the notion of young people on the Internet conjures
up images of an anonymous environment that does little to support
youth to take an active role in their communities. Leinz Vales, a
senior at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn, New York, and editor
of a global online magazine, "Urban Inside View," is defying
that negative image by using the Internet to empower youth to make
a difference in the world, and in their own education. As a leader
in a 74-country youth network, Leinz is gearing up for the launch
of "Star of Hope," a project which will focus on helping
rural Chinese youth to attend school. "The technology allows
us to mobilize thousands of students around an issue that's real,
but that might not end up on teenagers' minds otherwise," Leinz
explains. Working with the China Youth Development Foundation in Beijing,
he and other students worldwide hope to make a difference in the lives
of Chinese students, and in their own, by bringing additional Chinese
peers online and into an eleven-year old global online community known
as I*EARN. As Leinz describes it, "you start connecting with
things you see on the news once you've got a community of people that
can actually work to make a difference."
The Star of Hope
Project, and over 75 other online projects that use the Internet to
empower youth to make a difference in the world, will be highlighted
when students and teachers come together in Beijing, China in July,
2000 for the Seventh Annual I*EARN International Conference.
The global community
of educators that makes up I*EARN (The International Education and
Resource Network) combines a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experience
with the will, the skills, and the tools to make a positive difference
in the world as part of students' education. Each summer, the non-profit's
K-12 educational telecommunications network of over 3,000 schools
and youth organizations in 74 countries worldwide comes together in
a different location on the globe to share their experiences of working
with educational telecommunications, and to build new and ongoing
project work throughout the school year.
Workshops for
this year's I*EARN conference will again span the curriculum and the
globe: from language acquisition, literacy, global art, science, math,
creative writing, and social studies, to school reform, telecommunications
among incarcerated youth, in schools for the blind, and in runaway
and homeless shelters. From Kazakhstan to Uganda, Argentina to Australia,
Zuni, New Mexico to New York City. Educators will come to learn how
telecommunications is being employed to affect education reform in
Belarus...to meet and get involved with the global project community
of a K-12 literary anthology...to hear a teacher from a rural school
in Australia tell the familiar story of one computer, one telephone
line, yet, in this case, many projectsto learn how workshops in Israel
and the West Bank are introducing telecommunications as a way of bridging
communities and building educational partnerships across Arab and
Jewish communities...and to see how teachers and students from Pakistan,
India, and Egypt are building online conflict resolution and civics
education into their ESL curriculum.
I*EARN is unique
in the field of educational technology. It is a global community with
the vision and purpose to enable young people to undertake projects
designed to make a meaningful contribution to the heath and welfare
of the planet and its people as part of the educational process, regardless
of their level of connectivity. Teachers and students are involved
beyond solving math problems quickly, but rather seeing how math can
affect real world issues of pollution, for example. Over the past
eleven years I*EARN has pioneered low-cost, on-line school linkages
to enable students to engage in meaningful educational projects--with
peers around the corner and throughout the world. I*EARN has grown
from a 12-school pilot program (New York State - Moscow) in 1988 to
a locally sustained global network of thousands of schools in 72 countries.
I*EARN sees all
the players in the educational process as being important, including
youth organizations, human and environmental/development agencies,
as well as teachers, facilitators, administrators, parents and the
community in participatory and contributing roles. Each year, over
100 projects are carried out across the I*EARN network, all with the
purpose of connecting student learning to real world issues and making
a difference in the world.
A few examples
of recent I*EARN projects, all developed and facilitated by students
and teachers in the network, include:
- Holocaust/Genocide
Project & "An End to Intolerance" Magazine
- The Water Monitoring
Project
- The Recovery
Project - Teen Substance Abuse
- "Inside
View" - An urban teen affairs magazine
- First Peoples
Project (connecting Indigenous youth worldwide)
- Non-Violence
and Conflict Resolution Project
- The CIVICS
Project: ESL through Civic Literacy and Participation
- Gender Equity
Project
- Local History
Project
- Refugee Project
The Seventh Annual
I*EARN International Conference, hosted by the I*EARN-China Center
in Beijing, China--the first time being held on the Asian mainland,
will build on earlier I*EARN international conferences, including
Argentina in 1994; Melbourne in 1995; Budapest in 1996; Barcelona
in 1997; Chattanooga in 1998; and Puerto Rico in 1999. For automated
conference information and a registration form, send an e-mail message
to: confregistration@us.iearn.org.
For conference information: http://www.iearn.online.edu.cn
-For information about I*EARN: http://www.iearn.org
or call 212-870-2693.
I*EARN member
countries include: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Australia,
Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Brazil, Bulgaria,Cambodia, Canada, Chile,
China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt,
England, Estonia, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary,
India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya,
Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia,
Mauritania, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Netherlands, New
Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto
Rico, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South
Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey,
Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, United States.
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