Garfield Elementary Students Link Up With Japanese Children

The laughter of Japanese schoolchildren awaiting their lunch in snowy Kyoto, Japan, echoed through the darkened school gym. The sound was beamed halfway around the world, via the Internet, into a small laptop computer and through speakers set up to let 100 parents and students at Garfield Elementary listen.

The connection was little more than a phone call using a $3,500 receiver, but the technology that allowed it was on display last week at Garfield’s technology night.

Students in Garfield teacher Steve Willett’s sixth-grade class have been exploring the expanding possibilities of on-line learning in part through e-mail chats with a Garfield third-grader who is in Japan for four months.

The exchanges have been going on since November, with questions about food, homework and school buses being fired to AnneLucy Virnig-Stilger’s half of the globe.

.. It is really fun,” AnneLucy wrote in November.Last Wednesday, Willett, with the help of Shadle Park High School technology teacher Don Story, took advantage of a software program that allows for phone chats.

“Do you have snow?” AnneLucy asked her classmates in Spokane.

With Mead High School Japanese teacher Mitzi Kerwien acting as an interpreter, students in Kyoto asked questions about school life here.

One person wanted to know if AnneLucy’s teacher was well liked. Willett’s simple response, when translated, apparently had comic meaning in Japanese, because the students giggled.

On-line pen pal letters are just part of the Internet uses at Garfield. Students are also exploring the World Wide Web, an offshoot that allows words to be combined with pictures and sound.

Story’s students, some of the most advanced in the area in programming on the World Wide Web, have built an Internet site about rain forests. Students have searched the Internet, a global network of computers, for useful information and posted it for Willett’s students.

“This to me is the height of learning because it is learning the whole world can see,” said Willett.

His students are a bit baffled at the labyrinthine configuration of the Internet.

“I think it’s really cool how you can surf and look at cartoons and stuff,” said Erin Schibel, a sixth-grader in Willett’s class.

“It makes a little sense but not a lot of sense,” said fourth-grader Abby Hensz. “It’s very much worth it, because if somebody is in Germany you can talk to them in the U.S.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TRANSCRIPTS ON WEB Transcripts of the e-mail between Stilger and Willett’s students, can be found at the Shadle Park High School home page at http:/ /www.shadle.org/japan/index.htm.

Staff writer Jonathan Martin’s e-mail address is jonathanm@spokesman.com.