Fernando M. Reimers et 3].

their study of 260 participants in middle schools in Connecticut, Maryland,
New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, the authors found that such simulations
provided students with the necessary scaffolding to work collaboratively in
building new knowledge and skills relevant to global problem solving, com—
munication, and decision making. However, this gain in skills was specific to
the female students, and there was instead a decline in the level of skills of the
male students.

Given the promise of technology in bridging geographies and in working
collaboratively with diverse student populations, the Asia Society (2008)
has documented the integration of technology into global education cur—
riculum in classrooms. Several states have expanded the availability of
online international courses and have created virtual school—to—school partv
nerships with schools in other parts of the world. For instance, Delaware,
New Jersey, Ohio, and Washington departments of education have part—
nered with iEARN to offer professionalvdevelopment support for teachers
around online project work with schools in other geographies. Similarly,
the Florida and Michigan Virtual High Schools offer online courses to
students in world cultures, history, global studies, and Mandarin. Indiana
and Kentucky have also recently developed distance—learning courses in
Mandarin for their students. However, it remains to be seen whether these
interventions are being scaled across the state or whether they are just
smaller pockets of innovations whose success is yet to be determined. In
addition, as identified by Patterson, Carrillo, and Salinas (2011), there ex—
ist several logistical, technical, and intercultural challenges to successfully
implementing global—learning virtual classrooms, and one must account for
them before scaling such programs.

In this section, we have summarized various programs, strategies, and
innovations being implemented around global education by states with
the purpose of illustrating the wide variation in approaches in use, rather
than of being comprehensive in examining every available program. We
find that while these varied approaches represent positive steps toward

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