The International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) (www.iearn.org) and Elluminate's Fire and Ice program have joined forces on a groundbreaking international collaborative project called Machinto. On Thursday, April 17, 2008 (11:00 am EST), elementary schools from Canada, United States, Iraq, Japan, and Mali (West Africa) collaborated online in a virtual classroom to promote peace and friendship. The students introduced their classrooms, schools, communities and countries through Power Point presentations, used web cams to introduce their classes and read their stories and poems to an international audience that included visitors from Taiwain and the United States. To view the Fire and Ice Machinto event, go to: http://www.elluminaterooms.com/iearn/machin/ 

Machinto is an iEARN project facilitated by Yoko Takgaki of Japan, Mali Bickley and Jim Carleton of Canada. The Machinto project is based on a Japanese picture book about a little girl who is killed in the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. The girl comes back to life as a dove who spreads peace and hope to children in the world who are affected by war. Over the past several months, students from various countries have leveraged the internet to communicate their feelings and thoughts about this topic by engaging in online forums, sharing photographs and artwork, participating in collaborative literature circles, and developing their own picture book about peace and friendship. As a token of friendship, Machinto classes will distribute these books to children who live in war-affected areas including Afghanistan , Iraq and Pakistan . These beautiful picture books will be taken to the 15th Annual iEARN conference and Youth Summit in Bukhara, Uzbekistan in July and displayed before they are given to the teachers form war affected countries. These books and poems can be viewed on the project website at www.machinto.org.

"Through the Machinto project, students have developed a deep understanding of the effects of war on children," Students have fostered friendships with students from around the world, using ICT, expressing their wish for peace though art, stories and prose. Their results are truly inspiring. The students involved in the project learned much more than the traditional classroom learning. Their classroom has expanded to include students form all over the world. In the words of Saywer, one of the Web cast grade 6 students: “It is important for us to get to know students form all over the world because one day, we will need to learn to live and work with them. When we do projects like Machinto, I can feel that the world is really one big community, so I need to learn and care for the people in my community.”

About iEARN

iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) is a non-profit organization made up of over 20,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 115 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies. Over 1,000,000 students each day are engaged in collaborative project work worldwide. For more information about iEARN and Collaborative iEARN projects, visit www.iearn-canada.org.

About Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice is an award winning project launched by Elluminate, Inc. in 2006. Fire and Ice develops the leaders of tomorrow by connecting schools in North America and Europe with schools in developing nations (particularly those in rural and remote areas) and engaging them in live online collaborative projects that address critical social challenges (such as climate change, peace, democracy and poverty reduction) using the most advanced, yet economical and accessible ICT solutions.