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School Project 2004 was held by participants school which joined the Peace
through Poetry Project (PTP) 2003. The PTP was an unique project which
was planed to make up all over the world child's connection and World Wide
Peace through Poetry. 22 schools of 12 countries joined and they wrote
and upload poetry on web page. 240 students, 9th grader of us, had
participated in it in November - February (2003 school year) too. As
final program of it, Dream School Project 2004 was coming up here. We
had been preparing to join it since April. (It was just the beginning period
for school in Japan) . 12 students, 10th grader 2004, volunteered to
come in and they did good job, practice reading poem, decorating room,
making story for our presentation and so on. We heard the Video Conference started at 9:00pm on Friday, May 21, so we decided that all member, students and teachers stayed at school for one night. On that day evening, we had dinner meeting at the cafeteria and then we did final check device setting and decorating room. It looked that our students was not nervous because they had some experiences of real time chat and video conference with foreign countries in computer class last school year. ISDN connection also did work well, so we had only thing to wait for the time coming. At 9:00pm, Ms. Veasy at Florida called us and some one was appeared on the screen. Our students made shout of joy and said "Hello, can you hear us? Can you see us?" to friends.@For a while Greeting exchange were continued. But unfortunately two schools of England and Italy did not appeared on the screen. It seemed they had a problem on connection line or on setting up for device. Takarazuka Ryogen school (Osaka, Japan) also did not appeared because of non-compatible device. Then Ms. Perez who was coordinator decided to start the program with 4 schools, Chicago/New York/Florida, USA, Wako, Japan. She gave us some tips for progressing the meets and suggested to begin the Poetry Crossing. After 4 schools reading, she set Question and Answer time and we talked about the meaning of poetry, school life and so on. At 10:00pm, we promised to meet again and wave SAYONARA. (Here is a video clip(wmv) from Swanhurst School, Birmingham, England who had line connection trouble) After that, we moved to Seminar house where we stay for a night. All of us could not sleep by too big impression and kept talking and talking each other through mid-night. Unfortunately we were not allowed to be oversleep next morning because we had the open school day on Sunday. Many parents came to school and looked around at our classes! (written by Sugimoto)
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