ABSTRACT
From the earliest days of school access to the Internet, visionaries sought to bring students together across great distances. Some of these projects remained small or were short-lived, but in this chapter, we describe the work of two of the largest and longest lasting international projects that use online and blended learning to promote intercultural understanding. The first of these is the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) which began in the early 1990s as a link between schools in New York and Moscow and has grown to include more than 30,000 schools and youth organizations in over 140 countries involving over 2,000,000 students daily in over 150 collaborative projects guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The second is Connecting Classrooms for Global Learning (CCGL) a U.K.-based initiative that began building school partnerships between economically highly developed countries and those whose economies are still developing in 2015. According to the British Council, the CCGL has worked with 13,000 school leaders, 30,000 teachers, and over five million learners in more than 40 countries worldwide. The lessons to be learned from these two massively influential projects should be of great value to educators eager to have their students get the benefits of collaborating with culturally different learners around the world.
