Asia-Pacific
iEARN Professional Development Courses
iEARN offers both face-to-face and online professional development workshops and courses for educators seeking to integrate online global project work into their classrooms. Since its start in 1988, iEARN has trained (online or face-to-face) over 3,000 schools internationally in the effective use of educational telecommunications. iEARN's first online professional development courses, completed in November 2001, have become a model for online teacher training in global education. Teachers from 23 countries were certified as iEARN Master Teachers in online collaborative learning.
Each course is designed towards the teachers building up the skills to lead their students in online collaborative projects run by iEARN. More specifically, during the course teachers will:
- Select and integrate an online collaborative projects into the classroom
- Correlate the online project/s to local/state/national education standards
- Learn how to manage the classroom and technology resources available as they participate in an online collaborative project
- Communicate with iEARN project coordinators and teachers to get first hand knowledge about the project/s they would like to integrate
- Engage and maintain long-lasting post workshop personal and professional relationships
Each course is divided into eight modules, with one lesson per week, with readings, discussions, individual and group assignments. Participants select a project that matches their state/national standards and begin integrating the project into their classroom during the course period.
Five subject-specific online courses are offered: Creative Arts, Creative Writing/Language Arts, Social Studies/Contemporary Affairs/Geography, Science/Environment/Math and English as a Foreign Language/Second Language Acquisition. Each course brings together K-12 educators from the US with their peers in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and South America. The online courses are both asynchronous and interactive, with the iEARN discussion forums connecting the twenty participants for each course with the two facilitators. Frequent feedback is given from the facilitators and participants throughout the course period. Participants who successfully complete all the course requirements receive a certificate from iEARN-USA.