3144. Communicating with Overseas!



I was going to write about the social media in the classroom, do you remember?
And I’ve remembered an anecdote or story of my mid-90s of last century. Emailing was starting. And we in our school thought of communicating with students over the Atlantic, with students from the US. Said and done. All regarding emailing was starting, as I said, and so another teacher, one expert at computing, assisted me in this nice enterprise.
Now emailing is so basic, but then communicating with overseas was all a historic fact.
So first I had to take all my class to the computing classroom, where my students composed their texts on the computers, both in English – for them to practice English, our common target language – and in Spanish, for the American students to learn and acquire that language.
Summing up, my colleague compiled all the texts and sent them to the concerted American school in a single email. You know, my students were expecting their emails, from the US! I took their American emails and read them out in the classroom, where my students were expectant and looking forward to hearing from their American comrades. And there you have the story.
How did we find another school overseas? That was part of a mystery for me: my colleague teacher had previously found kind of a school posting on a virtual noticeboard that they wanted to exchange emails with somebody else on the earth. We had fun. / Photo from: iguazu-forest Excursiones en Iguazú. The picture is just an illustration. But you may think our enterprise was also hazardous…

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