A Chat with New Friends

I participated in one of the most enjoyable projects of my teaching career last spring of 2007. I was helping teachers a Burke High School in inner-city Charleston. We had a small grant to publish something with a cultural focus. I was able to connect a group of seniors at Burke HS in South Carolina with young children in a technology program in Ha Noi with the Blue Dragon Foundation. Blue Dragon works with Street Children. The Embassy of Ireland had recently funded the creation of a technology room with four or five computers.

The Blue Dragon students suggested the title for the book as "A Chat with New Friends". That's really what the project was. Students emailed each other from 10,000 miles apart. They talked about their lives, their interests and things in which they take pride. Burke sent a You Tube video address so the Vietnamese students could watch their amazing marching band. Vietnamese students find it hard to understand what a band has to do with high school.

Many Burke students can be considered poor. They found themselves wealthy compared to the Ha Noi kids. The exchange was interesting.

The technology person at Blue Dragon did all the interpreting. The final product was the previously mentioned book entitled "A Chat with New Friends". It was published with all stories, both sets of kids, in English and Vietnamese.

The kids in both locations loved the books. I can't believe this simple idea produced such powerful results.

It's a goal of Think About the Children to create lots of cross-cultural projects with students in Viet Nam and America. The learning is real and gets kids engaged like never before.