The basic introduction. Students introduce themselves, give a basic personal description, tell about their hobbies, what they do in their free time, what instruments or sports they like, their favorite movies, shows or books. It is very important at the beginning of a project for the students to get to know each other by name and not refer to the other as “the Russians” or “the Chinese.” This can be facilitated by placing them in pairs, one from each nation, who will remain working partners for a while. However it is done, experience shows that the sooner they know each other personally, the better the working together will be. This project can be asynchronous (a Google Document or forum) or synchronous (live video conference.) If done synchronously, it works best with some basic exchange of information (photos, interests) before the live encounter.

Students prepare information about their place of residence. They report to each other what life is like for them. This includes school sports, classes, how they test, what their school is like, what their city is known for, what styles and fads are popular, etc. This project is fun, interesting, and easy to do.

Each international group selects a movie they feel best represents their nation's social and cultural realities. After each class views the movie from the other group, students have a video conference to reflect on cultural distinctions, answer cultural questions, or explain culturally opaque aspects of the movie to the other group. Can be modified to use art, popular music, or other cultural items as well. Discussions can take place asynchronously on a blog or forum as well.

Schools collect stories in their nation’s media about the other country. Each side summarizes the stories focusing on the nature of the topics, the tone and attitudes taken, and the frequency of the reporting of the other nation in general. Students report their findings to each other through forums or video conferences. Students then reflect in blogs or journals what they learned. This can be adapted to many subjects (art and theater in the media, politics, etc.)

Students are placed into pairs with one from each country. Teachers put together a set of questions and each pair, working together, tries to find the most correct answers. Students can only discuss the questions with their partner from the other country and are not allowed to talk to classmates from their own school. At the deadline, the teachers take the answers and declare which pair won the contest. Some type of prize is offered to the winning pair.

Students teach each other their language. Since many schools are trying to learn English, the US school can teach their partners the latest slang or colloquial vocabulary and the other school can teach basic introductions and greetings. Willingness to learn some foreign words from other students who are learning English goes a long way toward building friendship and mutual respect. If both schools are trying to learn the native language of the other, the possibilities are nearly endless.

Students work together to raise money for a micro loan to a needy person in another country. They select their person together and communicate with the recipient. This can be coordinated through an organization called Kiva. (www.kiva.org) This is great for bringing together students from different cultures for a common cause. A good project for clubs too.

Students research the issues between their countries and make viable proposals on how they could work together to solve world problems in areas such as the environment, the economic crisis, international terrorism and mutual understanding. This project is more difficult and time consuming due to complex vocabulary. The Media Project is a good way to lead into this. The Language Project above is helpful to cue each group to relevant vocabulary. 

According to Daniel Meadows, Digital Stories are “short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart.” Digital stories are so open-ended and adaptable that there is really no succinct prescriptive guideline. More information and examples can be found at http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/. One great example of Digital Story Telling from a Language Arts project can be found at http://1001flatworldtales.edublogs.org/   The free program PhotoStory is perfect for this. One way this can be incorporated into a foreign language course, is to have one school create a digital story to send to their partner school which then creates and imbeds subtitles into the media.

Students create short videos exemplifying SAT or foreign language vocabulary. Results are collected and shared via the internet. One recent project of this nature can be found here.