I sought international contacts as part of our International Women’s Day celebrations last year. Girls at our school (All Saints Girls, Liverpool, Australia) ended up talking to girls in the UAE, Marshall Islands, Philippines, USA, Turkey, China and India (thought not all through Skype – Aussie time zones are a bit tricky). The students learnt so much about gender issues around the world.

Our Skype contact with Steve Wilmarth in China led to a fantastic collaborative project between his English class and our IT class. Both classes wrote and filmed a short movie and wiped the sound. The movies were then exchanged, and the assignment was to work out what was going on in the movie and dub it with our own dialogue, music and sound…. with somewhat hilarious effects! For our students, this meant development and assessment of ICT skills, and for Steve’s kids in China it meant learning about narrative construction and practising English.

Finally, after exchanging the videos again and seeing our work dubbed with strangers’ voices, we had a Skype meeting between the two classes so we could personally meet the ‘stars’ of our movies.

The students had so much fun and were so engaged in their learning, simply because of the international collaboration.