Modern Day Pen Pals

Erin's taking a class this year called Virtual Classroom.  If you ask the kids what this class is about, they'll reply vaguely, "It's computer stuff."  Dig a little deeper, and you'll come to understand this is so much more than basic keyboarding and clicking your way around the web.

Erin asked me if I'd be willing to get her up to school an hour early today for a special project for Virtual Classroom.  Using Skype, she and her Virtual Classroom classmates connected with students in Croatia for an hour before school, and again during lunch. 

The school in Croatia was having a Fairy Tale Week, and they were translating fairy tales from Croatian into English.  Erin and some of her peers were editing the translation into English to make sure it was grammatically correct.

In that special way that Erin has, she truly connected with the Croatians.  They are now all friends on Facebook, and she plans on chatting with them via Skype from home.  They are fascinated with each others' lives and are excited to be making friends half a world away. Here's a clip from part of their conversation over lunch.



Back in the day, I had pen pals in Sweden and Brazil, and we had to wait weeks between airmailed letters.  Erin and her pen pals have the luxury of instant communication.  This is modern technology at its best.