Two classes separated by 4,638 miles found a way to come together through the use of technology. Thanks to Spanish teacher Rachelle Wilson, students have the opportunity to learn each others cultures through the use of video. Students in Spain are learning about American culture while students here have the opportunity to see what life in Spain has to offer.

“My first year teaching, I taught in the school as an assistant English teacher in O Grove, Spain,” Wilson said. “I taught English, art, ethics, and music. My supervising teacher or mentor at the school in Spain, ended up becoming one of my best friends. We’ve maintained a rather close relationship despite the distance, and she actually flew down for my wedding this past October. She, like me, is very passionate about her work, and it isn’t uncommon for us to brainstorm ways for our classes to interact. We “whatsapp” texted one day and the idea came about. We ran with it!”

The Spanish classes will be given the opportunity to respond to the video sent to them by Wilsons’ past students.

“Mrs. Wilson still keeps in touch with her students and their current teacher and so her old students who live in Spain created this video introducing themselves and showing us around their school and where they live,” Spanish teacher Seth Sartain said. “They sent it to us and so her students have been watching it and my students have been watching it and we are going to create a video to respond by showing them our school and introduce ourselves.”

The teachers hope that this project will help the students see Spanish as more than just a class they are required to take.

“My goal as a teacher is to make Spanish class more meaningful because Spanish class can easily just become homework, grades, and tests,” Sartain said. “If we show them real people who speak Spanish and that they are interesting it makes it more real and more fun to learn.”

Unlike most school projects, the teachers decided to give the students a lot of input on their video.

“We don’t mandate what the video consists of,” Wilson said. “Rather, we just provide the students with guidelines or parameters for the video. This is the students project and not ours. Whatever they are interested in filming and inquiring about is completely their prerogative.”

Wilson hopes the students get a lot more than just a grade from this project.

“It is my hope that the students here develop a meaningful relationship with the students in Spain, gain insight into the cultural differences and similarities, and expand their prior knowledge of what they consider to be ‘Spanish,’” Wilson said. “I can only hope that the relationship serves as motivation to learn the language and provides them with a real-world situation in which the language is necessary for them to learn. It takes Spanish learning out of the classroom and allows students to take responsibility over their own learning.”

The students are excited about the project and what they will learn from it.

“The class from Spain made a video introducing their school and their town in English,” sophomore Ellie Hager said. “The video that we are going to make will be an introduction of our school and ourselves in Spanish. This helps all students involved because we both are speaking a different language to the native speakers of that language. It was really interesting to see how the Spanish students spoke English. We are all looking forward to making our video and seeing their response. It was really cool to see their video and learn about their culture. They seemed really happy and had a lot of fun.”