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“How do you set up an on-line project with teachers in another country, such as China?”
Lawrence Williams
Assistant Head Teacher, The Holy Cross School, Surrey, UK
Lead Practitioner in ICT, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT)
This is a question that we are frequently asked, and it was suggested by SSAT that examples of edited correspondence, showing how ideas and projects are developed should be published on the web. Approval to publish was sought and gained form Beijing.
What follows here is a sequence of emails leading us to the above picture. At the meeting were educators from several groups: Holy Cross School in south London; Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences; Beijing Normal University; and Shijizhuang College. Also present were teachers from several schools in Beijing.
Following this is a further set of emails showing how the curriculum content of some of the project was developed
The emails were sent during July and September 2006.
Getting Started
The correspondence relates to communication between me and Wang Wei, a researcher, in lime green, seated second from the left.
Setting up the meeting in Beijing
Following an email to Wang Wei, a researcher at Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences, and whose email address was found on the MirandaNet web site, www.mirandanet.ac.uk. Wang Wei kindly referred me to a Mr. Zhang at School No.50. I replied as follows:
Dear Wang Wei,
I am pleased to inform you that I have made very useful contact with Mr. Zhang at Beijing No. 50 School, as you kindly suggested, and we are developing plans to collaborate by email, the internet, and video-conferencing. Thank you for your kind introduction.
The plan is that School No. 50 will be working with me, from September, to develop science education and cross-curricular work in the “Science Through Arts” Project, which I created with the support of my colleagues at NASA, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. I recently asked my STAR co-directors, Ruth Petersen, and Pathfinder scientist, Joseph Kolecki, to welcome School No. 50 into STAR, and I am pleased to inform you that this has now been done. School 50 is the first Chinese school to become involved in STAR.
I am aware that cross-curricular work is new, and so I shall be very happy to guide Mr. Zhang, and his excellent school and teachers in this new way of using ICT tools to support science learning. NASA scientists see this cross-curricular method of working as the way forward for science education in the new millennium.
As I mentioned, I shall be in Beijing on Monday 14th August. You have kindly informed me that the schools and colleges have a vacation at this time, and it will not be possible for me to lecture at your university, but I should still warmly welcome the opportunity to meet some of your teacher-trainers, if this at all possible. You will see from my signature file that my school is officially designated by the UK Government to train teachers, and one part of our "Outreach Programme" is to share good practice with teacher-trainers in other countries. I have just returned from a lecture tour of Macedonia, where I saw many computers donated by your own government to support ICT learning there. It is a small world. My visit to Macedonia would not have been so successful without the generosity of the Chinese government
If, therefore, any of your teacher-trainers were available to visit me at the Plaza Hotel on the evening of Monday 14th August, I should be very pleased to share the pedagogy that underpins our work in ICT education. Perhaps next year, I might also be able to work with your trainee-teacher students as well.
Thank you, once again, for your kind introduction for me to work with School No. 50.
Warmest regards,
Lawrence
Following confirmation of hotel accommodation in Beijing:
Dear Lawrence
It is good to hear from you. We are looking forward to meeting you, too.
As to booking a suitable conference room at the Plaza Hotel, I think it is no problem. But I have some thing to confirm with you.
1. Let me know the Chinese name of the hotel you will stay in Beijing, because I did not know “The Plaza Hotel” at all. Could you tell me the telephone number or more information about the Plaza Hotel?
2. You are going to arrive on Monday 14th August in Beijing and you will be in Beijing for two weeks, which is a fully organized tour. I want to know when you would like to meet us. Will we meet and discuss with you on Monday evening 14th August or Tuesday evening 15th August? Or another time? Please tell me your preferred time of the conference, and then I will book the conference room. You may be tired after arriving in Beijing.
3. We have 5-6 English teachers from the secondary schools to meet you. What will we do for you?
Keep in touch
Regards,
Wang Wei
Sharing a vision of education:
Dear Wang Wei,
Thank you most sincerely for your very kind help in making these arrangements.
I look forward to meeting you and your colleagues.
My wife, Susan, who is also a secondary school teacher, will be with me. She, too, wishes to link with a school in China.
Susan has lectured, with me, about ICT education in Skopje and Bitola Universities, Macedonia, and also has taught at Baylor University, Texas, USA. She is MirandaNet Fellow, like most of us!
At the meeting, there may also be a Mr. Gao, from Shijiazhuang College, who is a colleague of Professor Margaret Cox, at King’s College, London University, who kindly introduced us, by email. It may be that Shijiazhuang College will be able to link with Susan’s school in London.
My own interests are:
- Science Through Arts, a project with NASA
- Cross-curricular uses of ICT
- International collaborations
- Teacher training in ICT education
- World peace, through bringing the children of the world together in peaceful understanding
- My wife’s interests are in business and enterprise, and the teaching of English.
Please forward this email to those whom you think these notes may interest.
I am sure that this is the start of some important new forms of collaboration between our two counties, and I thank you once again for you assistance.
Regards,
Lawrence
PS Our flight number from Heathrow Airport is CA 938, arriving in Beijing
at 13.15, leaving, I hope, plenty of time for a 17.00 meeting.
Dear Lawrence
I am looking forward to meeting you and your wife in Beijing. And our schools are glad to link with your wife’s school, which is good news for us. I will arrange 4-5 teachers to meet you, who are from 2-3 secondary schools in Beijing.
By the way my interests are E-learning and E-teaching, international collaborations on ICT in basic education. Now I am doing an educational project, which is the research about E-learning in primary schools and secondary schools. We wish to collaborate with you.
See you soon.
Wang Wei
Practical issues
Dear Wang Wei,
Thank you for your kind support of my visit to Beijing.
Thank you also for helping with arrangements for the planned meeting at my hotel.
I am working, this week, at Surrey University, on an international Science Workshop, and do not have access to my home files. From the Internet, however, the Plaza Hotel is at:
100 Dongsanhuan Nanlu, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100021, China
There is no telephone number on the web page.
Please check that they are planning to receive a tour party, for two weeks, from the United Kingdom, organized by:
Voyages Jules Verne (based in London)
We arrive at Beijing airport on 13.10 on Monday 14th.
Allowing for some delay at the airport, I should be at the hotel by about 16.00 and ready to talk at 16.30, for as long as you like!
I am not worried about tiredness from the journey. I enjoy my work and will truly enjoy meeting like-minded educators, in an exciting new country.
On the Tuesday morning, we are whisked off to see the Great Wall of China, and will be kept moving for the next 13 days!
Thank you once again for your kindness.
Lawrence
Dear Wang Wei,
It sounds as if our interests are very much the same.
I have a wide range of helpful contacts in the UK, including the British Council, so I am sure we will be able to support a number of schools in China in obtaining links with schools in the UK. No problem.
You may have heard about severe terrorist difficulties at London Airport, but we are not going to be influenced by this. We will come, even if we have to WALK! You may want to check flight arrival times with the Beijing Airport, though, in case there is a delay.
With best wishes and thanks,
Lawrence and Susan
More practicalities
Hello, Lawrence
Yesterday I had contacted with the Plaza Hotel by telephone and booked the meeting room for our conversation from 17:00 to 21:00 on Monday 14th.
I and my colleagues will wait for you in the lobby at 17:00 on Monday 14th and I will take a booklet signed “MirandaNet” in my hand in order to be identify us.
I appended the photo which is of Tina Preston and me.
Regards,
Wang Wei
This made the meeting in Beijing possible. Next follows the setting up of the curriculum details.
Dear Wang Wei,
I had an error message from my email server saying that the attachment would not travel.
Here is the text in the body of the email, minus the picture.....
Links with China
The first meeting with our Beijing colleagues
On Monday 14th August, 2006, Lawrence Williams and his wife, Susan, arranged to meet a number of teachers and teacher educators in the conference room at the Plaza Hotel, in Beijing. The aim of the meeting was to see in what ways Susan’s school, Raynes Park High School, a Technology College in Merton, and Lawrence’s school, The Holy Cross School, a Science College in Kingston, could work together on international projects using email and video-conferencing equipment.
Arriving straight off the London to Beijing flight, Lawrence and Susan
were immediately engaged in a three-hour discussion about how ICT tools
are used in UK schools to support learning. Led by Wang Wei, (second from
the right in the picture) the Chinese group consisted of teachers at Beijing
Normal (Teacher Training) University, from Beijing Academy of Educational
Sciences, and from the city of Shijizhuang College, which is located about
100k from Beijing.
Also present were teachers from two Beijing schools, School No. 50 (a secondary
school) and School No. 27 (a middle school).
From a laptop, Lawrence showed a range of his Year 8 and 9 students’ ICT work and copies of these files, as requested by the group, were left with the teachers as exemplar work. Lawrence also presented copies of his Collected Papers in ICT Education.
Following this introduction, the group divided into two sections for more detailed discussions of how Raynes Park will work with Beijing No.27 to develop work under the “Enterprise” heading, and Holy Cross will work with Beijing No. 50 to develop cross-curricular learning, including an introduction to the NASA/ Holy Cross “Science Through Arts” Project.
The meeting was extremely fruitful, and Wang Wei, the group leader in Beijing, very warmly invited Lawrence and Susan to join her and her colleagues for a special Chinese meal at the hotel, including several dishes which she had kindly selected herself.
We plan to build on the success of this meeting during the coming months, working to develop both school to school links, as well as supporting new ideas in ICT teaching and learning at the Chinese teacher training colleges.
Dear Wang Wei,
It was a great pleasure to meet you in Beijing. We were grateful for your kind hospitality.
I have worked out a project in which you might be interested, using one half of a class that I shall be teaching, starting next week.
It seems to me that Chinese teachers would enjoy developing their English language skills, so this project is designed with this in mind. It also shows how students can be creative when using PowerPoint to support their learning of English.
I have a group of 15 students, each one aged about 14 to 15, who will work with me on this. I also plan to use the other half of my class (the other 15) to work with Gao Zhenhuan, if he and his team are willing to collaborate.
My students, 30 in all, as part of their once a week ICT lessons, will develop some famous English stories for children, using simple English sentences.
We will create these in PowerPoint, using about ten slides for each story - probably up to 15 stories for you in all. Each slide will be illustrated. As an option, and if your server will cope, we then have the opportunity of sending you some of these stories with animations, as I showed you in Beijing. This aspect will depend on how your server copes with big files, as these would each have about 30 pages, and might crash your system…. The project will work well without the animations, however.
We will send these stories to you, and leave space, on each slide, for your college students to add accurate Mandarin translations of the sentences, so each slide has a picture, a sentence in English, (London classroom students) and the same sentence in Chinese (Beijing college students. You then post these collaborations on special new web pages made by your ICT team, for your college students to read and enjoy, in two languages. We will then make links from MirandaNet to your new web pages, so that teachers in the UK can see how this first collaboration has worked.
The reason for splitting my class into two is simply to make life easier all round. Imaging having 30 stories arriving at the same time, for translation!
How does this sound to you? It should work easily, without too much stress!
Susan is planning to work with Beijing school No 27 on Enterprise and other topics, and I was pleased to meet Zhang Dianhua from No. 50, to discuss working on Science Through Arts.
So it was a very good meeting indeed, and we hope to develop many new projects with you over the coming year.
Thank you once again for your kindness and support.
With best wishes to you all,
Lawrence and Susan
Getting the details correct
Dear Lawrence and Susan
Thank you for your efficient work, wonderful ideas, and excellent project collaborating between London and Beijing both schools.
Firstly, there are some mistake in the text recorded our first meeting in Beijing. I am a researcher working in Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences. My assistant Miss Gong Xue, is a student from Beijing Normal (Teacher Training) University. Actually the Beijing group consisted of teachers who are from 11 primary schools and 6 secondary schools and the researchers who are from BAES.
Secondarily, it is my pleasure that the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is very interested in our developing collaboration. I agree to you editing our some email correspondence. As a case study I would like to share the experience of developing our collaboration and I would like to record how we have set up our collaboration. Would you like to email me the text edited from our emails? I thought I could learn a lot from your working.
Thirdly, today I had a meeting with the head teachers, who are from 17 projected schools in Beijing, discussing the details of working on the project and how to use ICT to support the collaboration between Beijing and London. They are very interested in your ideas, write or rewrite the stories, create these in PowerPoint, add their own creative ideas and pictures to illustrate the stories. We are looking forward to doing as soon as possible.
I think it is really an interesting project for both, not only for lots of students but also for lot of teachers.
Finally, I would like to introduce Professor Zhang Tie Dao to you, who is my leader and he is also Christina Preston’s friend. Professor Zhang is good at international collaborations in education and his English is excellent.
Best wishes,
Wang Wei
Dear Wang Wei,
Thank you for the further details of the group. This is helpful.
I shall look through our emails and select the key moments when our ideas were developed, and of course, will continue to develop, as time goes by.
I am truly delighted to learn that so many teachers in China are interested in the collaboration, and suggest the following:
The easiest way for us, as a single school, to work with many different schools in China, is for us simply to send the texts to more than one school or college. In this way, your students could add their own illustrations to the PowerPoint files from within a number of different schools. Your web site could have many different sets of illustrations. Perhaps, with so many participants, you might want a small competition to see which files are the best: the most artistic or most creative. Otherwise you might have HUNDREDS of stories to post on the web, and this would be difficult.
Finally, I shall be delighted to work on-line with Professor Zhang Tie Dao.
Perhaps he could monitor the project for us, with a view to publishing an academic evaluation at the end?
Thank you for your continued enthusiasm and kind help.
Best wishes,
Lawrence
Dear Lawrence and Susan
It is my pleasure to meet you and thanks for your e-mail. They are wonderful ideas for collaboration. I had forwarded your e-mail to Mr. Zhang Dianhua and his colleagues. I thought they will responses to your project. Thank you for your ideas. We are looking forward to getting your stories, I thought the project will work better without the animations, as I am afraid our email box is not big enough.
Regards,
Wang Wei
Dear Wang Wei,
I am sorry that I have not made my ideas clear.
My idea is not for Mr. Dianhua to work on this, but rather your own teacher trainers and/or trainees! (I am already developing a plan for science education with him.)
My idea is that we send YOU some simple stories, your teacher-trainees translate them into good Mandarin, with the help of their tutors, and then you post them on your BAES web site, as examples of collaboration between UK students, and Chinese teacher-trainers and their students.
In this way, the English will be perfect (I will check this) and the Mandarin will also be perfect (You will check that.)
Then you will have a useful language and cultural resource to show your NEXT group of trainee teachers. They could even look at your web site before they started college!
As part of this, you might, later on, send US some ideas about a FEW of the Mandarin characters, so that we can learn a little about your language, and how the pictograms and ideograms have been developed.
It could be an interesting project for both lots of students.
Please let me know if this is possible for your staff and/or students at BAES.
Best wishes,
Lawrence
Dear Wang Wei,
I have just had a meeting with a colleague at the Specialist schools and Academies Trust, who is very interested in our developing collaboration, and has asked to do the following:
It would be helpful to UK schools (and to Chinese schools, too) to have a record of how we have set up our collaboration, through MirandaNet, by email, and face to face.
I need your kind permission to use some parts (carefully chosen and edited) of our email correspondence, to show how ideas grow and develop. I promise to be sensitive about this, and that it will bring you only praise, not difficulty.
Please let me know if you are willing to allow this. It would be another useful aspect to our work together.
Best wishes,
Lawrence
As the answer was “Yes”, you are able to read this correspondence!
And so, on to sending the first PowerPoint story, without pictures:
Dear Wang Wei,
Please find attached a PowerPoint with some simple text, telling a story for a young child. This is part of our National Curriculum requirements both for English, and for ICT. We ask our students to consider:
Form: (PowerPoint narrative)
Purpose: (to entertain) and
Audience: (younger children)
The plan is that you send this PowerPoint to someone to translate into Mandarin and add the characters into the PowerPoint. Katie, has indicated where the Mandarin text should go. This is so that the illustrations that she has now started to create will still be seen easily on the page.
Can you kindly send this on to whoever can translate it, and return it, please.
If the system works, I have 6 more to send immediately, and still more to send next week.
There are 30 students in our group.
Then, later perhaps, our students could communicate directly with their partners in Beijing
And your students could also illustrate the stories, for comparison with ours.
Best wishes,
Lawrence, and the Year 9 girls at Holy Cross
Dear Lawrence
Thank you for your story.
On Monday, I will send this PowerPoint to my projected schools and then translate it into Mandarin and add the characters into the PowerPoint.
No problem.
Best wishes,
Wang Wei
And so the work begins.
September 28th 2006
If you have any comments on this page, please contact Lawrence Williams ( ) .
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