International Interactions
Also every year we usually have a variety of international guests, from Singapore, the United States, Indonesia, and other countries. This year, obviously, no guests could come, but we still wanted to connect with our international friends and new friends as well, so we reached out over email and Twitter to connect with different schools all over the world. We connected with schools in Singapore, India, Australia, Taiwan, Florida, Hawaii, and even international graduate students here in Kyoto. We arranged times and then connected over Google Meet, and even Zoom occasionally! Arranging the room and the wifi was a challenge. We ended up using 6 rooms and spreading out the students two to a computer to be safe. This created a lot of busy work setting up all the breakout rooms, but in the end we were able to have many great interactions. Overall we had 24 interactions over the course of the year, which we consider to be a great success!
 

Sometimes, however, we could not meet live, synchronously, for our interactions. When that happened, we used a screencasting program to film videos for our international friends to view at a later time. We hosted the videos within a Google Classroom and then guests could watch the videos and leave comments for us. All the students had a good time making the videos in class, as you can see below.

In Conclusion
So, we hope you can get a good idea of how English worked in class #withCORONA here at Sagano High School. As we enter the new school year next month and we continue on with the #NewNormal, we will continue to have a fun time studying English here at Sagano High School... in the safest way possible. Thank you!