Taiwan-Korea Zoom Exchange Meeting

 

With the school’s ISA course assignment, students were having fun presenting the beauty of Taichung, showcasing their talents, and sharing the love for K-POP with our Korean sister school in Daegu through international virtual exchange.

 

Two eighth-grade classes and my club students delivered slide presentations through screen share on Zoom in rotation. The idea is for students from both schools to interact with each other virtually online. According to our sister school partnership MOU, we were supposed to visit each other in April and October. However, international travel is still not possible with the pandemic ravaging the world. Then, it’d be an authentic environment for students to use English because we don’t speak Korean, and they don’t speak Mandarin, either. On top of that, we’re implementing the International Education course in the hope of winning another International School Award by British Council Taiwan.

 

ISA Course   

 

A professional learning community, composed of teachers of various subject areas, including Social Studies, English, Chinese, and Living Technology, is working hard on this huge project under the theme of The Old and New Beauty of Taichung. International collaborations with schools outside of Taiwan are a must, which I proudly took on the challenge to make numerous video conferencing sessions happen.

 

With the winter vacation assignments, we were able to involve ALL the eighth-graders in the ISA course. The assignment itself served as a script to talk about the assigned historical spots for online exchange video conferencing.

 

How to Describe a Place in English  

 

With structured writing assignments, all students had to do was answer the guided questions that include five elements to describe any place:

ü  History: When was it built?

ü  Location: How do I get there from KMJH?

ü  Appearance: How does it look?

ü  Activities: What can you do there?

ü  Feelings: How would it make you feel?

 

Four dedicated spots include:

u  Taichung Station

u  Taichung Second Market

u  Taichung ASEAN Square

u  National Library of Public Information

 

Talent Show

 

Based on my experiences of Skype or Zoom sessions, an exchange of talents is just like the icing on the cake. It’d not only help create a relaxing atmosphere but promote more interaction among the students. Since KMJH is famous for its dance program and traditional Chinese music club, why not encourage those who have been practicing a lot to show off what they’re really good at?

 

Other than that, there were students from both classes playing the guitar, the flute, and even the cello. They could also sing to the melody though they’d usually shy away from the microphone.

 

K-POP  

 

Without a shadow of a doubt, K-POP has been really catching on among teenagers worldwide. I encouraged those who are such big fans to include their favorite idol groups in the slides though I couldn’t recognize most of them.

 

To our surprise, the Korean students did not react much to this part.

 

All in all, I was glad to work with my Korean counterpart, who just took on the responsibility from her predecessor this semester. I’d be looking forward to more collaborations and exchange sessions with her and her students. Also, I hope the students who took part in the exchange for the very first time would enjoy it and feel the need to learn their English well. After all, that’s the purpose of learning this foreign language, isn’t it?