Portland, OR (PRWEB) July 14, 2010

Speak Shop, the award-winning provider of live Spanish lessons by video chat, has now delivered more than 15,000 hours of one-on-one Spanish lessons.

“I remember asking our first customer, ‘Do you think you will be able to learn Spanish this way?’ Now we have the numbers to show that it works,” said Clay Cooper, Founder and CEO

“When we started Speak Shop, no one was teaching Spanish using videoconferencing technology,” recalled Clay Cooper, Founder and CEO. “I remember asking our first customer, ‘Do you think you will be able to learn Spanish this way?’ She gave us a lot of affirmation and that fueled us to keep going,” he said. “Now we have the numbers to show that it works.”

Speak Shop, a family-owned business, was created to bring the world closer through language instruction. Speak Shop’s 12 Spanish teachers are based in Guatemala and Nicaragua and have found greater independence and financial stability by teaching online. “I am a single mother and sole earner, and Speak Shop has been very important in helping me provide for my daughter and improve my economic situation,” says Speak Shop teacher Mayra Juarez.

About Speak Shop Founded in 2004, Speak Shop is a certified B Corp (for benefit company) that increases cross-cultural foreign language education and generates fair wage businesses for talented teachers in developing countries. Customers take personalized, cross-cultural, conversational Spanish lessons at their convenience using a computer and high speed Internet connection. Speak Shop helps students learn Spanish online for good. For more details visit http://www.speakshop.com

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Clay Cooper had always struggled to learn Spanish. It wasn’t until he studied in Guatemala at age 31 that he finally succeeded.

Untours Catalog Fall 2009

During that trip he also learned that hard work and education did not always pay off. With limited opportunities in Guatemala, even his university-educated tutor lived in poverty. That experience inspired (www.SpeakShop.com), an online fair trade language tutoring business Clay founded with his wife, Cindy Cooper.

Speak Shop gives language tutors the training and technology to become micro-entrepreneurs, reaching customers worldwide and teaching via webcam. While tutors improve their livelihoods, by setting their own rates and hours, people who hunger to learn a language log onto their website to take one-on-one lessons.  These are only two of the many reasons Speak Shop was a finalist for the 2007 Project Enterprise Contest on PBS, which highlighted social entrepreneurs.

Untours Catalog Learn a Language for Good

Currently, Speak Shop’s tutors come from Guatemala, Nicaragua and Brazil. Cindy & Clay hope their business will grow to include many countries and generate a variety of cross-cultural connections. In addition, the software they have created will be usable by other businesses that address poverty.

“For me, the true benefit of an immersion program was developing a friendship with my tutor,” said Clay. “I now care deeply about what happens in Guatemala.  I hope that through Speak Shop we can share this experience at a global level and increase cultural awareness and concern.”

Check out the website at www.speakshop.com, and try a free lesson!

Speak Shop Leads the Industry in Social Performance Standards by Becoming the First Language Instruction Provider to Achieve B Corp Certification

PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Speak Shop, http://www.speakshop.com, a pioneer in online language tutoring via webcam, reported today they have been certified a B (Benefit) Corporation. B Corporations are a new kind of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. The certification performance standards are comprehensive and transparent. They measure a company’s impact on its employees, suppliers, community, and the environment. Certified B Corporations meet higher standards of social and environmental performance and accountability.

Created to fight poverty and to connect people around the world for face-to-face language lessons, Speak Shop offers customized, one-on-one Spanish lessons which customers can reserve and take at their convenience using their computer and a webcam. Speak Shop is the only company that strategically invites low-income tutors in developing countries to teach online as micro businesses owners. Speak Shop’s global customer base has provided tutors with sustainable income, and Speak Shop teaches tutors new computing and business skills.

“B Corporation certification represents what we believe in. We want to be part of a community of businesses that are committed to solving social and environmental problems. We also like embedding these values into our governing documents to ensure clarity and common purpose within the company and with investors and other stakeholders,” says Co-founder, Cindy Cooper.

About Speak Shop

Speak Shop was founded in 2004 to increase access to cross-cultural foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in developing countries. Speak Shop makes it possible to schedule, purchase and take one-on-one Spanish lessons by webcam with tutors in Latin America. Connected to a world market and empowered as micro-entrepreneurs, tutors move from poverty to prosperity. Customers are able to take personalized, cross-cultural lessons at their convenience using a computer and high speed Internet connection. For more details visit http://www.speakshop.com.

About B Corp

B Corporations are a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. B Corporations are unlike traditional responsible businesses because they: meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards, institutionalize stakeholder interests, and build collective voice through the power of a unifying brand. For more details visit http://www.bcorporation.net/.

Twice a week, Margo Griffin, who lives in Denver, Colorado, has a one-on-one Spanish lesson with her teacher, Mayra Juárez, who lives miles and miles away, in Antigua, Guatemala. Both attend from the comfort of their homes via the Internet, a webcam and an innovative socially responsible business called Speak Shop.

Mayra Juárez earns extra money by offering Spanish classes over the internet.

Antigua draws thousands of international students each summer to its Spanish schools. But in the off season, many teachers are out of work. Clay Cooper, founder of Speak Shop, noticed this when he took classes here in 1998, and thought the Internet could connect teachers and students year-round. From those roots, Speak Shop was born. Griffin schedules classes on Speak Shop’s Web page, pays online and “meets” Juárez at a specified time, either using the Internet communications tool Skype or Speak Shop’s Web-based software. Mostly, they talk and review exercises Juárez sent by email. But they can also check a word’s spelling via chat and its meaning with Speak Shop’s translator. “This is the ultimate program,” Griffin says.

Thanks to Speak Shop, Juárez, who also teaches at a Spanish school in Antigua, gets year-round business and makes twice as much an hour as she does at the school. She says Speak Shop has been a lifesaver during a time when tighter travel budgets and the country’s high crime rate are keeping visitors away. “Speak Shop has supported me since August,” says Juárez. “I didn’t have any students at the school, because there weren’t any.” Speak Shop charges $10 a class, plus a monthly membership fee of $9.99 to $39.99, depending on how many classes you plan to take. The class fee goes to the teacher.

Twice a week Margo Griffin, who lives in Denver, Colo., has a one-on-one Spanish class with her tutor, Mayra Juárez, who lives in Antigua. Both attend the class from the comfort of their own homes via Internet, webcam and an innovative business called Speak Shop.

Offering quality tutoring to students around the globe, the small U.S.firm employs struggling teachers in Guatemala.

’’I love the fact that our money is going to support that kind of program,’’ Griffin said.

Griffin schedules her classes on Speak Shop’s Web page, pays online and ’’meets’’ Juárez at the specified class time, either using Skype or Speak Shop’s own Web-based software.

They two women talk through headsets and review exercises Juárez has sent by e-mail.

They also use ’’chat’’ to work on spelling and use Speak Shop’s online translator to look up new words.

’’I think this is the ultimate program,’’ said Griffin, who tried Speak Shop when she grew tired of driving to group Spanish classes after work and never learning as much as she had hoped.

’’For less money, I can be in the comfort of my own home with a cup of coffee or whatever, enjoying the class,’’ she said.

SEASONAL WORK

The picturesque town of Antigua is home to dozens of Spanish schools where tutors like Juárez offer cheap, private lessons to foreign students of all ages from the United States, Europe and more recently from countries like Japan and Korea.

In the summer, the schools have enough students to employ hundreds of Spanish tutors. But in the off-season, many have no work.

Several companies have sprung up in recent years offering language classes – from Spanish to Potawatomi, spoken by the Native American tribe of the same name – via video conferencing. Since there are dozens of schools that operate in Guatemala, there is plenty of work for local tutors.

Online education, like that offered by Speak Shop, could solve some of the problems of traditional classrooms, said Michael Horn, executive education director of the nonprofit think tank Innosight Institute, which strives to use technology to solve social problems.

’’There are some really neat ways to customize your learning online that you can’t do in the traditional way,’’ he said.

Online learning programs also offer flexibility of time and place not possible in a normal classroom setting, Horn added.

Horn said he thought programs like Speak Shop were likely to expand to in the future. ’’There are a lot of people who want to crack this space,’’ he said.

However, economic conditions in many Spanish speaking countries prohibit teachers from buying the computers that could provide them with steady work. ’’It makes it difficult for tutors to earn a consistent living,’’ said Clay Cooper, who founded Speak Shop in 2004 with his wife, Cindy.

Cooper saw this firsthand while taking Spanish classes in Antigua in 1998. He visited the home of his tutor and was shocked to discover that the university-educated man lived in poverty. ’’I felt that the only thing preventing him from earning more money was just not enough [year-round] demand for his services,’’ Cooper said.

He thought the Internet could be a way to help connect tutors and students even in the months when most students had to be at home attending classes and most professionals had to be working. Six years later Speak Shop was born.

Speak Shop currently employs 11 tutors – nine in Guatemala and two in Nicaragua. Before they begin teaching for Speak Shop, the tutors learn how to use webcams and videoconference. They also learn to solve basic technical problems.

CONFIDENCE GROWS

’’At first it was difficult,’’ said Juárez, who didn’t have much experience with computers before she started working with Speak Shop. “But I began to lose my fear as I realized it wasn’t as complicated as I first thought it was.’‘

Now she has mastered talking with her far-away student through her headset, simultaneously typing clarifications into a chat box and clicking to another folder to look for the day’s homework.

Tutors set their own price for their work, which now varies between $7 and $10 per hour. Speak Shop takes none of these earnings. However, tutors who use the local Spanish school’s facilities to give online classes pay a small fee for the space.

Four of the tutors in Guatemala now work from home using their own equipment.

’’The fact that they can have a computer and Internet at home is really concrete evidence of the economic change,’’ Cindy Cooper said. Tutors use Speak Shop’s software and online scheduling system for free, while the company makes money from a monthly membership fee charged directly to students—from $9.99 to $39.99 depending on how many classes the students take. Still, lessons turn out to be cheaper than most language classes available in the United States.

Although still small, Speak Shop is growing rapidly. A total of 6,000 hours of lessons were offered in 2008 compared to just 3,700 the year before.

JOB-SPECIFIC CLASSES

Speak Shop also offers specialized programs for various professional fields and is accredited by the California Board of Registered Nursing to offer continuing education credits for nurses wanting to learn Spanish. No nurses have yet tried out the program.

Speak Shop has won recognition for focus on social responsibility. In 2005, the program won a prize for the ’’Best Social Return on Investment’’ from the SET Inventors Challenge: Social and Environmental Technology for the Developing World, a business plan competition for companies that generate social or environmental benefits in developing countries. It also was a finalist in PBS’s Project Enterprise Contest in 2007. The contest recognizes creative, social entrepreneurship around the globe.

The Coopers admit that trying to run a socially responsible business has been challenging.

’’We could do this the easy way and just bring on tutors who are in the United States, or in developed countries who speak English, have access to the Internet and so forth,’’ said Cindy Cooper. “But we’re doing it the way that will have the most social impact.’‘

Juárez now works from home, has a job year-round and makes about twice as much money per hour as she does at the Spanish school in Antigua where she still teaches during tourist season. She said Speak Shop has been a lifesaver at a time when tighter travel budgets and the country’s high crime rate are keeping visitors away.

Her student, Griffin, said she’s sold on the price, flexibility and individually tailored lessons, plus the chance to learn about another culture and have a personal relationship with her tutor. ’’While you’re expanding your vocabulary, you’re also creating an incredible bond with someone in Guatemala,’’ Griffin said.

Judging from comments on last Sunday’s “Five Places” list of oceanfront hotels, readers want cheap options. “Outside of a campground for not-so-rich weirdos, where can you stay by the ocean for under $79 a night?” one asked. Another reader commented: “I know a really good seaside place that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but I’m not telling you where it is. So there.”

Now children. Please share – that’s what readers of Spud Hilton’s extensive package of information on learning language are doing; some of their many SFGate.com comments and e-mails appear below.

For another look at the stories and more comments, visit sfgate.com/travel.

– “Find a local restaurant where the target language is spoken by native-speakers.”
– “The public library has lots of language learning resources, books, audios, etc.”
– “Local evening schools. Italingua has a great series of Italian classes (including one for pre-vacation, ‘postcards from Italy’). Alliance Francaise likewise does wonderful French. I’ve heard that the Goethe-Institut is great for German.”
– “Absolutely nothing beats two weeks at www.reginacoe li.nl/eng/index.html”
– “The best way to learn is to take language classes in the country you are visiting.”
– “Centro Latino in the East Bay (Berkeley) is a great place to learn Spanish. Small to very small classes and excellent native speaker instructors (also Portuguese).”
– “The best method for adult learners working on their own is the Pimsleur series of audio CDs, based on drills and prompted recall, with repeated review of previously learned material.”
– “Live, online native speaker tutors with video conferencing, which is almost like being in the same room as the tutor, but at a much lower price… All you need is a Webcam and a headset (or microphone and speakers).” (Recommended: Interlangua.com and Speakshop.com)

Published: Saturday, February 21, 2009

Hablas espanol? I can’t count the number of times of I’ve gone to Mexico and vow the next time I return, I’ll be able to converse with a cabbie or utter more than “Cerveza, por favor.”

Night classes or Spanish for Dummies DVDs can be helpful but it doesn’t compare to learning one on one with a tutor.

Clay Cooper, CEO and founder of speakshop.com discovered this in 1998 when he went to Antigua, Guatemala, and took private Spanish lessons from a tutor. “I never thought I’d learn a language, but I got pretty fluent.” It was then that he formulated an idea that was not quite technologically ready for prime time. But by 2005, the technology was in place for him to create speakshop.com, a website that uses video-conferencing software enabling people to learn Spanish from the comfort of their home from live tutors in Guatemala or Nicaragua. What makes Cooper’s service more remarkable, however, is its philanthropic edge. Students can choose from 15 to 20 tutors based out of two well-known language schools, which Cooper has partnered with: Probigua in Gautemala and Ave Nicaraguita in Nicaragua. Typically, these tutors might make $1 to $2 an hour, and their meagre incomes are susceptible to the ups and downs of the tourism trade. Teaching for Cooper’s service has given them the chance to become tutor-entrepreneurs, where they can set their own rates and schedules, a fair trade arrangement that works for everyone and allows them to participate in the global economy.

The first time Calgary radio personality Robyn Adair met with her teacher online, she was given a webcam tour of the school where the tutor works and learned a bit more about the impoverished city where the literacy rate hovers around 50 per cent.

Adair, of Calgary’s Country 105′s Odd Squad morning show, is just one of Speakshop’s online students. Several weeks ago she signed up for five hour-long sessions, which cost around $20. “I did a trial lesson, and I liked it,” says the DJ who couldn’t find the time to take a Spanish class because she’s in bed by 7 p. m. so she can be on air for the 5:30 a. m. show on Country 105.

“This is way more flexible. She’s there and she’s live and you get one-on-one attention,” says Adair, who took some Spanish in university, but now wants to brush up on her skills for an upcoming trip to Nicaragua. Each week, Adair can request what she’d like to work on, whether it’s past tenses or casual conversations. “She’s been very flexible. It’s a really cool idea.”

Adair chose her instructor based on biographical information and her interests. Each tutor has a posted bio, like single mom Arlen from Granada, Nicaragua who took a two-year course to learn how to teach Spanish to foreigners. With the money she makes from tutoring, she hopes to one day become a lawyer.

Cooper says he’s looking at introducing Portuguese classes and maybe a few more in the future.

To learn more go to speakshop.com, where there are also opportunities to help the communities where the tutors live.

The sound of Spanish vocabulary and laughter echo around Kerri Piette’s kitchen table.

Each week Piette takes Spanish lessons from Leonor Chivichón. However, Piette lives in Carlisle and Chivichón in Guatemala.

The two women connect through Speak Shop, a business that offers Spanish lessons from native speakers via the Web.

“We laugh a lot and compare notes about culture and current events,” said Piette, who uses a Web cam to talk face to face with Chivichón.

Next week, Piette will put her Spanish-speaking skills to the test, when she returns to Honduras to volunteer to Montaña de Luz, an orphanage.  The first person she hopes to impress is Celestina, an orphan, whom Piette considers a daughter.  “She (Celestina) teases me relentlessly,” Piette said.  “I promised if she studied her English in school, I would practice my Spanish so I could talk to her without using a dictionary.

While Piette’s Spanish has improved with Chivichón, she is also pleased to support fair-trade practices.

Speak Shop, a Portland, Ore., based business employs tutors from Guatemala and Nicaragua, allowing them to keep all of their hourly wages, which range from $7 to $10 an hour.  The company charges customers a subscription fee, ranging from $9.99 to $39.99 a month.

Students in Burlington High School’s alternative program also use Speak Shop to learn Spanish.  In this program, students take classes at night and enjoy the flexibility of having a Web tutor, said Burlington Superintendent of schools Eric Conte.

The School Department is also exploring the idea of adding Speak Shop as a supplement to the classroom.

“It’s not just a way of providing Spanish, but a way to add depth to a program,” Conte said.

Speak Shop tutors, who also teach at Spanish language immersion schools, say the business allows them a better quality of life and more time to spend with family.

“I think it’s (Speak Shop) not only going to change their (the tutors’) lives, but change the lives of their children and that to me is extremely rewarding,” said Clay Cooper, owner of Speak Shop.

Cooper began the business in 1998, after completing a Spanish-immersion program in Guatemala.  He was struck by the country’s impoverished conditions, and wanted to help tutors earn extra income in the off season, when tourists weren’t seeking lessons.

Piette said her enhanced Spanish language skills are critical to connect with children at the orphanage, many of whom are infected with HIV and AIDS.  “It (the orphanage) was going to be a hospice for children to die, but what happened was they started receiving antiretroviral drugs and living – and now it’s their home,” Piette said.

For the past three years, Piette and her son Jarrett, 18, have visited the orphanage.  “They’re always in our minds,” Piette said.  “There’s pictures of them on the mantel – we miss them.”

THIRD WORLD POVERTY IS AN OVERWHELMING THING.

Those who have seen it with their own eyes return home chastened by the experience but can think of no earthly way to make a dent in the misery.

After all, what can one person, one family, one couple do by themselves against such a monstrous enemy?

BrainstormNW, April 2008

The obvious answer is to write a check. Maybe it’s not a Bill Gates-sized check, but giving something – anything at all – seems right.

Even so, while gifts of money salve our conscience, they seem to disappear, without having the substantive impact envisioned.

Folks grow weary of feeling ineffectual, reasoning that a check, even many checks, will never replace what is truly lacking: a viable economic system that allows people to advance themselves. A marketplace.

In time, many givers shrug it off and get on with their lives.

Cindy and Clay Cooper are non-shruggers.

Not content to take the checkbook route, Cindy Cooper and her husband have decided to give the real thing: the gift of capitalism.

Yes, it’s the fish story again – the gift of a fish versus the gift of a fishing lesson that results in a lifetime of support – but with a 2008 twist: Give someone a fish and they eat for a day, give someone access to a virtual global marketplace of fish buyers and they eat for a lifetime.

The Coopers’ Speak shop, a nearly 2-year-old venture based in Portland, is a picture of perfect timing, marrying the growing need in a global marketplace to speak other languages with Internet technology that allows a virtual immersion experience.

Speak Shop’s one-on-one Spanish lessons are taught from Guatemala via live videoconference to Americans who have found their professions – especially in legal and medical circles – increasingly international.

The coopers provide the technology platform and act as the bridge between a growing crowd of students and their Guatemalan tutors. For this serviced, the Coopers receive a $9.95 membership fee from each student and then pass on full lesson fees to the tutors themselves, who for the first time, have clients year-round and businesses they can run and manage themselves.

Fascinating Oregonians - Cindy Cooper

It all began when Clay Cooper, a web tech guru who never traveled went on a trip to Guatemala to follow his career goal to “do something international.” He met up with a college-educated Spanish tutor living a surprisingly impoverished life.

It occurred to him that a man with such a bilingual skills lacked only one thing: a market in which to offer his commodity. The wheels began turning.

Cindy completed the vision, supplying her international experience growing up in Brazil and her unwavering belief in capitalism as a tool to bring about social good.

The result: A marriage, a business and a third-world venture incubator all in one.

Cindy, who says her time in corporate marketing for Nike gave her practical ideas for businesses to aid in developing countries, believes the power of business for social good “is still largely untapped.”

To date, Speak Shop has taught some 5,000 lessons online and seeks soon to recruit tutors in other countries and offer other languages.

The effect on tutor families has been nearly instantaneous, she says. Instead of struggling for necessities, Speak Shop tutors are able to stow away cash for their children’s education and to complete their own.

Even more, Cindy says, the tutors have become entrepreneurs rather than just survivors. “They’ve started developing marketing and business skills. Over time, something has shifted in how they think of their role,” she says. “Now that they’re out of survival mode, they think, ‘What else can I dream about?’”

Here are four steps to adding that je ne sais quoi to your language lessons via free Internet resources.

One of the biggest challenges for foreign language teachers is to expose their students to authentic speech by native speakers. Another is to immerse them in the culture of the language they’re studying when that culture may be half a world away. But in our expanding digital age, it’s increasingly easy to connect live with overseas students, find related videos and audio clips, and discover examples of living language online — all free.

“The Internet has made accessing authentic materials and interacting with native speakers an everyday occurrence in many schools across the country,” reports Marty Abbott, director of education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). “It has really brought the world into our classrooms.”

Keeping It Fresh

To keep their classes fresh and current, teachers can incorporate material from foreign Web sites. From overseas weather reports to department store sites that reinforce lessons on clothing terms, Janet Glass, the ACTFL’s 2008 National Language Teacher of the Year, says she can always find something online to bring her Spanish lessons to life. The key, she points out, is to limit activities sufficiently so that students can accomplish tasks appropriate to their level of fluency.

Before the rapid expansion of the Internet, teachers hoarded ticket stubs, receipts, advertising flyers, and other tidbits from their own trips abroad with the goal of importing a language’s culture to the classroom. “It’s all on the Web now,” says Glass, who teaches at Dwight-Englewood School, in Englewood, New Jersey. “All you have to do is search for theater sites from a country on a search engine to see what’s playing that day. It’s so immediate and so current.”

No Passport Needed

Besides giving students a doorway to contemporary culture in the target language, many sites offer something that used to be even harder to come by in the classroom: videos and audio clips, including podcasts, that range from real news items to fictional entertainment and multimedia language lessons.

“It’s very important for the kids to hear authentic, natural speech,” says Glass, who uses a beginner-appropriate BBC site with man-on-the-street video interviews filmed in Spain. “You can turn on subtitles, so you can see what they’re saying.”

At the Cincinnati Public Schools’s Academy of World Languages, teachers of Mandarin Chinese are incorporating podcasts into their lessons. Students start listening in the classroom, then take the recordings home on CDs or MP3 players to practice.

“Reading a language is much different than hearing a language,” notes the school’s technologist in residence, Dawn Miklavcic. “Understanding a language spoken at its true speed is hard for some of these kids, so hearing it over and over is important.”

Global Group Learning

With today’s more interactive Web, it’s possible for students to collaborate online with peers around the world. “Web. 2.0 technologies are just starting to creep onto language teachers’ radar screens,” declares Lori Langer de Ramirez, creator of the language-teaching resource MisCositas.com. “Things such as blogs, wikis, VoiceThreads — essentially multimedia blogs that allow voice and even video comments — provide students with a level of control and interactivity that lends itself to a constructivist approach to language teaching.”

Curtis Bonk, a professor in Indiana University at Bloomington’s Instructional Systems Technology Department, also cites the many possibilities for students to engage in collaborative language projects online. “I could imagine students creating wiki books to practice their language skills, maybe with students from other places,” he says.

The French (and More) Connection

The foundation for this kind of interchange is already in place. “The most effective use of the Internet is computer-mediated communication — chat, email, video, audio — a way for students to get in contact with students in other countries,” explains Robert Fischer, executive director of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium and chair of the modern-languages department at Texas State University at San Marcos.

Having e-pen pals is the easiest way to develop relationships with foreign students, and a variety of sites, such as ePals, provide help in finding contacts. “When I started teaching, you’d wait and wait and wait to get something in writing, and it was always old news,” recalls Glass.

Even more immediate, if a bit trickier to arrange, is simultaneous communication with students overseas via text chat using an instant-messaging program or through free international Internet-based audio and video calling, offered by Skype. “We’re moving away from writing our pen pals and going towards Skyping them,” observes Bonk. “To me, that is the next stage of language learning.”

Challenges remain, of course. It can seem daunting to find appropriate contacts among the legion of anonymous strangers roaming the Web. Fischer recommends eTandem to find partners for safe conversational exchange in more than a dozen languages. For live chatting or talking, time differences can also pose a problem. Still, the opportunity for students to interact live with native speakers without the time and expense of travel abroad can be well worth the effort.

Former Dwight-Englewood School student Nick Schwartz used Skype to study Chinese as part of a senior project. He wrote in a journal about his experience, “I have communicated with a Chinese student my age on the other side of the world for a month. It has cost me absolutely nothing, and I have learned about his life, his friends, and family. People just don’t get how revolutionary it is that this exists now. People never understand how different it is when you can hear (and if you have a webcam, see) the person you are talking to.”

Laila Weir is a contributing editor and writer for Edutopia. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers, and online publications around the world.