Starting Point:
Via the Kent Teachers list, Helen Smith had sent information from the Global Hilites website, www.globalschoolhouse.com concerning an exchange with a school in Russia. This sounded an exciting next step and the class was eager to participate.

When we received details of the project, it was not a simple exchange, school to school, but a project linking approximately 25 different classes. The lead school was the Cosmonautic School for gifted children in Siberia, and other schools taking part were in, to name but a few, Finland, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Italy, South Africa and several American States. Fortunately everyone corresponded in English! To make the project easier to manage there was a theme, which was Easter Customs, and a deadline for each stage of the project. There was also a pre-set end date. We started with Introductions, then moved on to the next subject. The culmination was an exchange of Easter recipes and the sending of cards by 'snail mail.' This was exciting and it was tangible proof for the children that these electronic messages were coming from real people.

The volume of mail generated by this number of schools was quite difficult to cope with as time needed to be found in the school day to read it all. I found that the best way of doing this was to integrate the project into the curriculum. Geography was an easy one. Our science for the term was 'Earth and Beyond' so we were able to consider what time of day it would be in these other countries by considering the rotation of the earth. We could also talk about the northern and southern hemispheres and the effect on the seasons. In English we wrote our messages and compared them with letters, Easter customs tied in with RE, and in art we made the Easter cards. In music we listened to composers such as Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, and we even tried some Russian dance.

Tesco Schoolnet2000
The following term we used the Tesco Schoolnet2000 materials, People Around the World. Through contacts with friends teaching in Canada and South Africa, and some of the schools that had taken part in the Easter project, we sent questionnaires asking a few children in each class to tell us about themselves. As the replies came, each child in my class had a partner from another country and compared the partner's answers with their own lives. Each child then typed up their work on their own page on the site. These now form part of the bank of information on the Tesco site which is a feature of the Learning Zone in the Millennium Dome. Though the children enjoyed this work, it was very difficult to get everyone's work on to the site using one computer in the classroom!

E-Pals
During the summer holidays I made contact with the site www.epals.com Here you can respond to other schools' appeals for partners or write your own, stating any preferences you may have for particular countries, ages or topics. I received lots of response from this. One school in Japan was particularly keen to correspond but it was difficult for them to understand that we were unable to communicate with them through August. We had so many responses that we had to politely turn some down. Our favourite was the class in California with whom we had a 'Joke Exchange'. This was very interesting from the point of view of language development. My class was mystified by the joke, "Why did the coach go to the bank?" ....... "To get his quarter back." Having first explained what a 'coach' was in this context, then a 'quarter' then a 'quarter back' and the play on words, half the class was even more confused, a quarter (sorry!) had almost dozed off but a few bright sparks were nodding in appreciative understanding!

Christmas
Back at the Global Schoolhouse site, I found a project hosted by Martin Reed from Glasbury School in Wales. Martin invited teachers from different countries to join in a project building up to Christmas. Again it was arranged in stages with a deadline for each stage of the project and plenty of discussion time in between for children to ask each other questions. Martin puts participating schools into different groups so that the number is not too unwieldy, and encourages participants to send their questions to everyone so that we all have a sense of belonging to a group. The project ended with the making and sending of Christmas cards, which were very eagerly received. Some of us used digital cameras and scanners to send pictures of the classes. Glasbury School sent pictures of themselves making and posting our Christmas cards. We also received photos from a class in the Mojave Desert and a tiny correspondence school with 6 pupils in a remote area of New Zealand. It provoked an interesting discussion when they announced that they would be the first people to see the new millennium!

Whitstable 100 years in the future
In this same term I wanted to get more classes in my school involved. The Global Schoolhouse site had a project called, 'That was then.this is now.what will be the future? Our year six class was studying the local area in geography and also doing some desktop publishing, so they produced a brochure about Whitstable and the school, which were posted on the website. This included photographs of the local area. A year 5 class was working on the Victorians in history, so they sent an article about Whitstable 100 years ago, together with scanned charcoal drawings of oyster fishing. My class did some creative writing about Whitstable 100 years in the future and we scanned in a collage of a very futuristic scene.

Hong Kong grandparents
This term we have been in contact with the grandparents of a child in the class who live in Hong Kong. They sent us a fascinating account of Chinese New Year and made it even more exciting by sending us a parcel of goodies connected with the festivities. We are also taking part in another of Martin Reed's projects, this time to do with Customs. We are only just getting started with this one, as the schools in the Southern Hemisphere tend to start their term in late January or early February after their long summer holiday.