What's your favorite story that goes to the heart of what I*EARN is about? Wow, there's so many in I*EARN over the years. Here's one example. There's an organization that provides the mechanism using bicycle parts to provide clean water to communities in Nicaragua. There they are faced with a situation where human and animal wastes and also fertilizer run into the water supply and make it impossible to drink the local water. The children are required to walk twice a day seven or eight km to fetch water for their community. Students around the I*EARN network heard about this and realized that they could both learn from those kids in Nicaragua about geography, about socioeconomic issues in Central America, and also they could work with them to bring appropriate technology by using bicycle parts to build a pump and then to seal a well so that the community could have clean drinking water. It is a project that was put up online by one of the teachers in I*EARN who had gone to Central America and learned about this. By using the technology they were able to mobilize the kids around the world, in some cases to raise money. They raised about $10,000 actually. More importantly, they sent teams into a number of communities and actually were able to cap the wells in a number of towns in Nicaragua. Kids in the United States in those cases and several other countries received mail back from the communities in Nicaragua saying that for the first time the kids were able to go to schools because they didn't have to make this trek over the hills to fetch the water twice a day. In fact one girl wrote that she was in school at that moment writing for the first time and was very pleased that now she could share something of her own community. And so the reciprocity of the giving and receiving was built-in from the very beginning. Those students in Nicaragua were now for the first time able to share of themselves, share of their history, their culture, and participate meaningfully in the dialogue. On the other end, kids who had participated to bring the well could never leave high school knowing that they couldn't actually impact somebody's life somewhere in the world even if on a very very small scale. They had a role to play and they could play it using this technology to work together. That story is now told on the Web, so it's possible to go onto the Web and hear how students did it and also read some of the dialogues that were going back and forth. The description of the bicycle pump is up there. It became an interdisciplinary academic project. One, it is a Spanish project. Two, it's geography--where is Central America, where is Nicaragua? Three, it's a health issue because it's water born diseases they are dealing with. Four, socioeconomic because the community didn't have electricity so it doesn't pay to expect them to put in some electric driven power solution. It was really an example of how you can approach many aspects of the curriculum at the same time that you're actually making a difference in somebody's life. And how are the projects organized? cliff's edge || jump || innovate || email