Making international links

A web site to help schools link up (The Guardian 1998)

Adding an international dimension to the curriculum is something we’ve talked about for years. As the ‘Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges’, a part of the British Council remind us, in a world shrunken by technology, young people will need to find the skills to work, communicate with and understand other cultures. And as numerous schools have discovered, linking up with peers abroad is made dramatically easier using the Internet.

More surprisingly as a Loughborough Infants school shows, ‘school links’ isn’t just about foreign languages since they been exchanging electronic mail with children in Florida. Working on what they called ‘Mind’s eye monsters’, the children described to each other some monsters they had painted. Next they set about trying to paint the other’s monsters, and put the results on their web site for all to see. As it often is with schools linking up, you can only see some of the colour, richness and fun that this adds to children’s learning.

The Central Bureau have been promoting this kind of work for 50 years and it’s only recently, as the distance between classrooms and the Internet has started to shrink, that real opportunities have arisen. There’s the history class in Sunderland using mail to ask a German school about the bombing of Hamburg and gaining some very human replies. And then there’s the Tower Hamlets school that linked up with children living on the rubbish tips of Guatemala City to talk about children’s rights.

You can find out about these projects on a new Internet web site run by the Central Bureau. Called ‘Windows on the World’ it also helps you to link with schools across the globe. It holds the details and Internet addresses of teachers with ideas for projects. You can visit it freely, enter your needs and it will find a match with someone in Sweden or Singapore. You can also fill in a form to put your details to a database for others to find you. Either way, using Internet links to build school links seems remarkably apt.

As the web site, or any well travelled languages teacher will tell you, funding may be available from the Central Bureau and through a number of European Commission schemes. For example the Socrates programme supports schools wanting to build partnerships. Other funding words to look for are Comenius and Lingua.

Contact: www.wotw.co.uk 

WOTW Video from The Central Bureau, 10 Spring Gardens, London SW1A 2BN Tel: 020 7389 4419 Price £19.85.

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