Reading Across the Continents

Earlier in the year, my 5th hour, Day 1 Integrated Technology students began a collaboration with Constantia Waldorf School in in Cape Town, South Africa.  Due to timezone differences, we were unable to Skype with one another.  Still we felt that a connection between our students would be so powerful and meaningful.  We decided instead to exchange videos of our students reading aloud a favorite title and then sharing a little bit about our respective schools.  

In small groups, our New London students had to make a few important decisions: What books would they read and what aspects of our school and community did they want to share with other students across an entire ocean?  Once these decisions were made, each group went to work reading a favorite children's book and deciding how they wanted to share more about New London.  To give you an idea of our exchange, here is one group's video.

 

Unfortunately, time moved too quickly, and our friends in South Africa were not able to get their videos to us in time. Today, though, they did send us a fun surprise- a few pictures of the class with hand-made thank yous for sharing our videos.  We were so excited to see the faces of the students for whom we created our videos.

Regardless of geographic and timezone differences, collaboration with students from different parts of the world is possible through creative uses of technology.  We can't wait to come back to school this fall to finally see the videos that our Cape Town partners have created.