Finding a Partner School

If you have a friend working at a school in Japan or elsewhere with whom you are in regular contact, you have an obvious avenue for starting an exchange program. You may also have a friend working at a local branch of a Japanese company who can help you make contact with someone in Japan.

For most folks, however, the internet itself will be the tool used to find a partner program. There are two major possibilities: finding a site dedicated to linking up schools, and finding school sites and contact people directly with whom to try starting a project.

There are a number of sites dedicated to pairing up schools. The best I have found is e-PALS. In the site are contact people at schools interested in starting a project. There are over seventy countries and sixty or so different languages represented, so the chances of finding someone are good. As sites like e-PALS evolve, they will probably also begin to provide more and more help in carrying out projects.

It is also possible to find a partner by looking at sites put up by the schools themselves. Any of the major search engines will list some; Yahoo!, for example, lists about fifty schools in Japan from elementary up. On Yahoo's main page click on K-12 (under education), then "countries", then "Japan". Even better is a Japanese site which catalogs over a thousand high schools alone, arranged by prefecture. You might also use this list to examine the web site for a school of a contact you find in an exchange list like those on the e-PALS site. It can be more work looking at individual school sites to find a partner, and once you find a contact address and send a friendly introductory letter, most schools probably will not respond. However, finding a school this way gives you the chance to learn much about a school from its web site before trying a project.

On the off-chance that, in searching for a partner school, you send out several messages and a number respond (too many), remember that you can try some shorter-term projects at different times through the school year. This might also help you find just the right schools on which to focus your internet projects in the future.

However you find your school, it is very important to establish that you have a reliable contact on the other end. I will send a half dozen or so messages back and forth with a person to make sure he or she checks and responds to mail regularly before firmly going ahead with plans for an exchange. It is also a good idea to be in touch with a second person at your partner school, so that if the first person becomes busy, sick, etc., the whole project doesn't grind to a halt.

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