While doing research for National History Day, students in Tea McCaulla’s Florida high school stumbled upon Women’s Airforce Service Pilots and Letters from Home, a book by World War II veteran Bernice “Bee” Haydu, now 96.

Students contacted Haydu in 2015, who agreed to an in-person, videotaped interview three hours away in Palm Beach, where she lives part of the year.

She talked about her time in the service, and students learned her uniform is in the Smithsonian. “It was so powerful, and I thought, ‘There has be something that we can do with this video,'” McCaulla says.

She contacted the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project, which added the interview to its collection.

McCaulla incorporates oral history and preserving veterans’ history into English classes at her current school, Pickaway-Ross Career & Technology Center, a regional CTE hub serving juniors and seniors from 10 high schools in south central Ohio.

Her students learn how to do historical research with primary sources and how to use technology to record videos—in some cases, they use Skype to conduct interviews that can’t be done in-person. They also work on public speaking, listening and writing.

“There’s just so many different skills involved that it makes it a very powerful learning tool, and these students become primary source contributors to the Library of Congress” McCaulla says.

Students grow academically and emotionally when they interact regularly with senior citizens, says Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that aims to improve the lives of youth and older people through intergenerational collaboration.

“They learn history in a way that they can’t learn just from a book—they are learning from a personal experience” says Butts.

Additionally, young people who work with seniors often score better on reading tests, perform better overall in school and are more likely to be ahead academically or have caught up if they had been behind, Butts says. “It’s the extra attention and the extra time that other person takes with the student to believe in them.”

Digital biographies

This past January, 150 fifth-graders from Fullerton School District in Southern California created digital biographies of local senior citizens as part of the school’s iPersonalize curriculum. It’s an approach to teaching state standards that gives students “voice” in the community, says Robert Pletka, superintendent of Fullerton School District.

“We try to develop curriculum where students are positive agents of change, first for themselves, but also for the community” Pletka says. “We operate under the idea that kids can make a difference right now if we get them the knowledge and the tools.”

The biography project, called Story Angels, required students to work in teams of four to interview senior citizens at two local retirement communities. Students used their district-provided iPads to record the interviews, and wrote an essay about their senior’s life.

The seniors either visited the students at school, or the students visited the seniors at their homes. The district provided some additional lighting and microphones to improve the quality of the recordings.

Videos were posted to a YouTube channel created especially for Story Angels. Students made substantial gains in speaking, listening and narrative writing, says Pletka.

Costs to conduct the program were minimal: The district provided a bus when students needed to get to the centers for interviews and students created a folder including the DVD and biographical essay as gifts for the senior citizens.

At Pickaway-Ross Career & Technology Center, McCaulla’s students are now helping a WWII Navy veteran—Donald Rodde of Livonia, Michigan—write his autobiography from a handwritten 699-page manuscript he had never been able to get published.

The school paid for the students to travel to Michigan with McCaulla to discuss the manuscript in person and spend the day with him. The students were a little hesitant at first because they had to learn to read the cursive the manuscript was written in.

Still, her students learned more lessons through the project than she had expected, such as new vocabulary words and how to navigate Google Docs, which they used to type the manuscript and to interact on editing, McCaulla says.

“The amazing thing about this is these are events that helped shape our history, and the students have the opportunity to hear directly from our veterans what happened” she says.

Golden helpers

Students from pre-K to grade 12 at Bradford Area School District in rural Pennsylvania have been connecting with senior citizens for more than 15 years.

Once per week, preschool students ride a bus to a local nursing home. Teacher Marty Cummins says building personal relationships and conversation skills are key focuses of the program. “A lot of 4- and 5-year-old kids enter preschool and have not been exposed to a lot of vocabulary” says Cummins.

Laurie McGee, a second-grade teacher at George G. Blaisdell Elementary School, combines arts and literacy in her students’ activities with senior citizens. Guided by a local musician, students and seniors learn instruments and sing songs together. Second-graders also read aloud to seniors to develop literacy.

“Any student who has had behavioral issues always seems to impress me with how they (positively) interact with the seniors, so I think this experience is wonderful for building social skills and conversational skills” says McGee.

Erin Waugaman, the principal at Blaisdell Elementary, says senior citizens are good role models who can share their life and career experiences with students and stress how important academics are.

“We are in a high-poverty school district, and it takes just one adult to connect with a child to make a difference in their life” says Waugaman.

Bradford Area High School students get hands-on career skills working at local nursing homes. Students enrolled in the certified nursing assistant program do clinical hours at local nursing homes, and some even get jobs in those roles after graduation, says Superintendent Katharine Pude.

“If we really want our students to be college and career ready, then we need to make them good stewards” says Pude. “We want them to grow into adults who can give back to their communities and understand the value of that.”

As an added benefit, seniors who volunteer in the school as “Golden Helpers” can earn breaks in property taxes. Golden Helpers read to students, provide academic tutoring and sometimes do odd jobs.

“We are in the business of building relationships” says McGee. “For those kids to know that someone believes in them and is proud of them can really help them take off academically.”

Elaina Loveland is a Boston-area writer.

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Since January 2017, junior and senior honors student have spent about an hour each Tuesday afternoon helping seniors set up laptops, operate smartphones, archive digital photos and organize email inboxes.

The students have learned a high degree of patience to make sure the seniors repeat certain skills until mastering them, and moving on to new tasks. They have also developed valuable communication skills.

“A lot of the students in this program are better than their peers at speaking clearly” says Amanda Powers, a district biology teacher and National Honor Society advisor.

Spring says the senior citizens have gained new awareness beyond technology. “Senior citizens may feel that their taxes are too high and vote down school budgets” Spring says.

“They may not be aware of the value that the school district provides to the community. I thought that this was a win for all involved and for the greater community as well.”

Elaina Loveland is a Boston-area writer.

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Armstrong, who teaches 12th-grade world history at Greenup County High School in the Greenup County School District, partnered with the City School in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and Emrawah Secondary School for Girls in Ramtha, Jordan.

The 10- to 12-week project encouraged students to solve a problem in both countries and present their ideas at a school board meeting or another community gathering. This year, Armstrong’s class chose drugs, and explored the cause and effects of substance abuse locally, nationally and globally.

Throughout the project, the students exchanged photos and personal perspectives relating to their daily lives, culture, history and government.

Armstrong collaborated with partner teachers via email, Google Hangouts and Skype to discuss the activities for the project, which was organized by the Global Nomads Group, a nonprofit that has facilitated collaboration between about a million students in 60 countries.

Armstrong describes the international collaborations as an “eye-opening experience” for her students.

For example, her students were surprised to learn that there were cities in Jordan. The Jordanian students were surprised to learn that not everyone in Kentucky lives on a farm, has a horse or attends the Kentucky Derby.

“I want my students to see the world beyond Greenup County High School, beyond Kentucky, beyond the United States” says Armstrong. “They will realize that a teen is a teen no matter where they are located.”

10 Tips for Teachers

Jill Armstrong, a world history teacher in Kentucky, offers tips for success in an international teaching collaboration program:

1. Find a reputable program that can help you connect to teachers in foreign countries. Depending on the country you want to connect with, governmental obstacles may be difficult resolving alone.

2. Embrace the learning. You don’t have to agree with the culture, but you can appreciate and respect the experience.

3. Be flexible. You’ll have to cope with time zones, security issues and language barriers.

(Continued.)

First-hand information

Such collaborations reflect the growing “virtual exchange” movement, as technology makes it easier for learners and educators from various parts of the world to share ideas and work on projects together, both in real-time and asynchronously.

Even better for educators is that most of the technology is relatively low-bandwidth, meaning rural, less affluent districts also have access, says Tonya Muro, executive director of iEarn USA, an international nonprofit that facilitates virtual classroom collaborations.

Districts are eager to join these programs because students learn to empathize and communicate with their peers from other parts of the world, whose daily lives may be vastly different. And in a world of blogs and fake news, such virtual exchanges allow students to get first-hand information from around the globe, Muro adds.

For districts that haven’t participated in such a collaboration, organizations such as iEarn can share with them lesson plans of teachers who have aligned the activities with core curriculum goals. “This country is so multicultural, we have no choice but to learn about ‘others’ if we want to survive as a nation” Muro says.

10 Tips for Teachers (cont.)

4. Find another teacher/class in your school to join you.

5. If you have younger students, include the parents.

6. Make sure you have good computer connections, and time to use them.

7. Use pictures. All students of all ages and languages enjoy taking and sharing pictures.

Becoming part of the world

Ben Jatos’ students at Fort Vancouver High School Center for International Studies in Washington, have collaborated with peers in Brazil and elsewhere via UNESCO’s International Youth Virtual Town Hall on Global Citizenship.

The initiative also includes teens from Canada, Haiti, Kenya, New Zealand, Morocco, Palestine, the Philippines, Slovenia and Sweden.

Students worked on seven global citizenship assignments, which focused on sustainability, human rights, gender equality, cultural diversity and non-violence, among other topics. Students in the different countries posted writing assignments as blog posts, and compared their work.

Jatos’ students completed the project by collaborating to write the International Youth White Paper on Global Citizenship. The paper was presented to international delegates at the UNESCO Global Forum in Ottawa, Canada, just last month.

“Many of my students did not feel like part of the world before” says Jatos. “And now they feel like they are part of something bigger. There is so much power in realizing that these kids are the same across the world.”

Jatos also saw an improvement in his students’ writing.

“They knew that when they write these blog posts there is a genuine audience who is going to read them—other students around the world” says Jatos. “They put so much thought and effort into it that the product was stellar.”

One challenge was finding the extra time for the independent study project during the school day. Jatos says he sometimes pulled students out of regular classes, and other work was done during lunch and after school.

Jatos and his students have interacted twice with foreign classes in real-time using Cisco’s WebEx platform. Jatos and his students had to get up quite early to account for the time difference.

Jatos’ projects have enjoyed his superintendent’s full support. “Future-ready students need future-ready learning environments” says Steve Webb, superintendent of Vancouver Public Schools.

“In an interconnected and interdependent world, young people must learn how to understand global issues, communicate with diverse audiences and act as responsible and compassionate citizens.”

International collaborations are valuable for teachers, as well.

“A teacher spends so much of their time within four little walls that we lose sight of big-picture things sometimes” says Jatos. “Our world gets small; international collaborations remind us that there is so much out there, and that the world is a big place.”

10 Tips for Teachers (cont.)

8. Have a goal in mind as to what you want your class to get out of the experience.

9. Communicate regularly with your partner teacher via email, Skype or Google Hangout.

10. Have fun with it. Your students will remember it forever.

Respect, tolerance and understanding

Longtime educator Christine Terrey, head teacher at Harbour Primary School in Newhaven, England, has participated in many international teaching projects. But one is most memorable: a two-year digital literacy project in which her classes collaborated with Robert Morris Elementary School in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

With videoconferencing, the students shared their perspectives on various assignments face-to-face. “Technically, you could do this collaboration with a classroom in a town next door to you, but what the children found interesting was the cultural differences between England and America” says Terrey.

Harbour Primary School evaluated students at the end of each year of the project. They had to regularly listen, speak and share their work with students in Scranton.

As a result, students’ scores on speaking and listening assessments increased, in part due to the digital literacy pro

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