Scotch College

Connecting with the world

During 1998, the boys in 6S have been participating in some language activities with students on the other side of the world.

Each boy in the class has had his own keypal from River-Oaks Public School in Canada. Through the Internet and email, the boys have been communicating regularly to discuss what they have been doing at school, and in their daily lives.

It has been very entertaining to witness some of them exchanging ideas for projects and helping each other with homework tasks. A book of literature was created between the two schools. With the help of their Canadian keypal, the Scotch boys were required to write a story about.. 'A day in the life of student in Canada'. While the Canadian students wrote about..'A day in the life of a student in Australia'.

Via email, questions and answers were sent and received daily, to enable their stories to be as accurate as possible.

As the Canadian school year goes from September to June, during Term 4, a new group of Canadian students was eager to find a keypal to work with from Scotch. To involve boys from each of the three Year 6 classes, five lucky boys from each class were invited to participate in the keypal programme. The project for the participants was to embark on an enquiry, comparing an aspect of Australian Aboriginal culture with a First Nation's tribe.

As a very exciting addition to this project, we were able to set up a live video conference between the two countries, which involved the fifteen participants from each school, enabling the students to see and talk to each other. Each school's live images and sound appeared directly onto their computer screens, via the use of CU-SeeMe software and a small digitiser video camera, which was placed on top of the computer to capture the images.

Reflecting back to the reaction of the boys, when they were able, finally, to see and talk to their keypal, exemplified that the whole exercise had been extremely worthwhile.

Whilst some boys have lost contact with their keypals, others continue to communicate via email and have actually developed very close friendships. One boy is actually hoping to venture over to Canada with his family, at Christmas, to meet his keypal.

Mr Robert Stummer