For the first time ever, Honors Japanese 3 students are participating in a year-long video exchange project with students from the Tamagawa Gakuen school located in Tokyo, Japan.

Currently, Assistant Director of Instructional Technology Diane Main is assisting the students and Japanese teacher Keiko Irino with the video editing aspects of the project. Before the students started filming, she presented a lesson to each class about fair image and music use and introduced basic video editing concepts.

“This […] particular project is the first one where I’ve been really able to get in and work with the students more, but we’re at ways of having me do that with some other [classes] too,” Main said.

However, some students still had difficulty with the editing process even after Main’s explanation.

“It was tedious […] I’m not really good with movie editing, so it was kind of hard to make it work,” Patrick Lin (10) said.

All students are assigned a partner from their class to collaborate on the project with. Every pair of students is required to compose a short self-introduction in Japanese and introduce two locations of the Upper School campus in both Japanese and English.

The project encourages Japanese students to communicate in Japanese outside of the classroom with native speakers of the language, according to Irino. Likewise, students from Tamagawa will be communicating in English with members of Irino’s class.

“It will be a great opportunity for [students] to utilize the language they are studying. I think it will turn out really well,” Irino said.

Students also shared similar views on the project.

“[We’re filming] the pool and Nichols […] It’s really fun,” Ankita Sharma (9) said.

In the future, Irino also plans to include students of Japanese teacher Masako Onakado in the project. In addition to learning more about Japanese, many students are looking forward to making new friends through the project.