Our Conclusion and Final Summary

The overall response to the iEARN project by class TRW1 in Bloomfield, Connecticut, is that we felt that the project was beneficial. When we first started the project we wrote a list of what we wanted from the project. We also decided what we wanted our major question directed towards the others schools to reflect. We wanted our question to reflect something that we believed everybody regardless of where they are would have knowledge about and also reflect something that everybody was affected by. We were also really interested in what the kids would say when they responded to our question. We wanted to get an idea of their lifestyles (their personal freedoms and restrictions) how they thought and maybe why they thought this way. After we agreed on the minor details of question, we created our final questions: How did 9/11 affect the other schools? What if any were the changes to their daily lives? What changed in their country?

The next step we took as a class was reading the responses to our questions and reflecting upon them. We as a class feel that the responses from the classes outside of the US were similar. As with most people in the world, their overall reaction to the 9/11 attacks was shock. They all included the racial sides of things, the relations between their countrymen and the Muslims in their country changed for the worse, the tensions increased to a level higher than it ever was before. They also said that even through the given circumstances they have not changed who their friends or who they hung around with but they do think twice about whom they trust in the future. They did say that their parents do not react differently but they think more seriously. The all also said that their governments tightening their security, especially at airports.

The responses to the 9/11 attacks from classes within the US were also similar but not what we expected. We did not know that the children in these classes actually witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers firsthand. We thought that they were sad and heartbroken because they were so young to understand and now that they do understand we feel as if those images of the destruction will forever be with them. We did, however, feel that we can relate to these responses (responses from the classes within the US) more because we are from the same country and therefore the affects of the attacks were experienced firsthand.

We realized that our response to our own questions was not so different to the other response even through we are from different parts of the world (and different parts of the country). Some similarities we found is that we all felt that the world became more harsh to and less understanding of the Muslim community, security was increased and the that there is a heightened sense of alarm throughout the world. We feel as though that the responses to the question has given us a greater perspective of how exactly people we were affected by the 9/11 attacks and in some weird way we realized that we were not alone.

We enjoyed hearing from people in other countries. Some of us have never had the chance to do that. It opened us up to different perspectives and ideas that we have never thought of. For example, the students in the Netherlands seem to have less restrictions and more freedom than we do in the United States. It is also interesting to see that ideas are universal despite where your geographic location is.