My name is Ira Bhattacharya

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ira Bhattacharya and I am Anita's colleague. I am writing to you in my capacity as the International Project Coordinator of my school and am very happy to know that you have liked some of our project ideas and have agreed to work with us. It is an honour for our school. I am sorry I did not write to you earlier.

Perhaps it might interest you to know a little about the kind of international work our school is involved in. At the moment we have student exchange programmes with the UK and Germany as well as internet/post- based projects with schools in other countries.

We are indeed so happy to work with you and your school. I am sure we have so much to learn from each other! I love to work on international projects as they really widen your horizon and help you to learn the richness and diversity of world cultures.

Just a little about myself. I am 46 years old and I teach English and German in school. My husband teaches History at University. My son is 15 years old and will be appearing for his Board examinations in February.

Our rest of this school years timetable is - we have just started back with school for 2013 - today; our first semester ends the 21st of January, 7th - 18th January we have Chinese New Years break (I will be in Australia that time).Spring break is 22nd - 31st March and school ends 22nd June.

1. I have a middle school, grades 6 - 8, section in six week rotation that is a class on publication. That would be a good class for exchange of ideas, interviews, learning about one another. I have a new section of students, 10 - 13 students in two weeks. We call it applied studies and the students have six different courses each lasting six weeks.We are finishing up t;his sction and I start a new rotation on the 21

2. My high school course is 'broadcast journalism' and is a year long course. We will begin a new project the 22nd of January. It would be interesting to work with another school on how news is perceived and broadcast. For example taking a similar world event story and exchanging how it is presented in our two countries. The only problem would be we teach in English so I am unable to understand how news is presented on a Chinese station. We listen to BBC, NBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Network). We are just completing a section on documentaries with students doing their documentary on what is in their life; for example, some are boarding at our school so they are doing a documentary on student life here, another is doing it on Model UN she is involved with another is doing a documentary on their hometown in Southern China. I really would like to try doing a collaborative documentary between our two schools.

3. Our upper school music teacher (grades 6 - 12) is interested in doing a collaborative music project. Nothing defined - open-ended to start. Perhaps students could create a musical piece together via Skype, Emamil and a music shiaring program on-line such as they use soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/) to exchange music they have created now.

What we have learned from using Skype is that we are good for about 15 minutes then it goes down and we have to re-connect. I do not know if that is a government issue or our Internet connection.