Horton Global connecrtions is an attempt to help students see outside the classroom. Serving as an ongoing aspect of our Media Studies unit in English 9, the Global Connections project provides concrete, relevant examples of the Global Village phenomenon.

Students received a hands-on, precise example of effective use of communications technologies. For instance, while setting up an audio conference, students asked me what I was doing, half joking about my playing with the computer as they came into the room. Jokes turned to surprise and enthusiasm when the speaker on the other end, a Japanese web designer and student from Tokyo, asked our class if anyone in the room spoke Japanese. No one was more surprised than our Japanese exchange student, a monolingual boy who was able to share his impressions of Canada with someone from his homeland.

Using the Internet was a valuable experience because, in addition to developing greater appreciation and competence, students grew to realize that people cared about what was going on Greenwich, Nova Scotia. People were reading their works, sharing ideas with them on the English 9 discussion forum, and talking to them during class. These three avenues really helped drive home the point that the Internet can be used for distributing ideas to the world, not just collecting them. In essence, they learned that the Information Highway is a two-way street.

That said, video conferencing proved to be an increasingly difficult challenge due to the issues of firewalls at schools, coordinating meeting times with other schools, connecting with other teachers in the English Language Arts field, time zone differences, availability of appropriate technology, and the shift of students at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, the ultimate success of this project was muted due to the fact that the technology was unavailable when my students were ready, and when the technology became available, I had a new semester’s worth of students who needed to be prepared in very short order.