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Written by: Katt Wilkinson |

Edited  by Mike Baker and Mikhela Hull |

As  journalism students from The Morgan School, we have not onlybeen writing articles about events happening in the school and around the town and the community, but we also have been visiting Ecuador by corresponding with student journalists from throughout the world.

A classroom of high school journalists from  InterAmerican Academy, an American school in Guayaquil, Ecuador, is corresponding with us through a wiki.   One of the students from this journalism class explained: “our school is very small (only 63 in the high school!) We as a student body are very united.”

Mostly we have been  getting to know this  journalism class through videos and email. We have read their school’s newspaper called  The Bite, The difference between their journalism class and ours is that we do individual articles which we can publish as we complete them.  They  have one  newspaper that they publish once a  semester. In the videos, we  exchanged  personal information about us such as  our name, who we are, what we like, our favorite hobbies, an article we wrote, and what we liked about their newspaper.  We also asked questions about their newspaper and school. When I read their newspaper, I was very interested in the Halloween article.  I asked why it was such a big deal to them, and one of the students in their journalism class explained: “the reason we did a party is because it’s one of our favorite events of the year, and we all like to celebrate it together”

Our journalism teacher, Mrs. Chausse, hoped we could video chat with these students during class,  but unfortunately their class schedule does not match our schedule. Most of our big topics that we have been discussing with them have happened in our country: the Boston bombing and the North Korea threats. Even though these events are close to home they are also affecting the students there too. Some of the students have family around the affected areas. They sent us an article to discuss  about the Boston Explosion and said, “This article had an impact on us due to the fact that both Isabella and I have family living in Boston and New York which is really close to the general vicinity. This catastrophe is beginning to scare us since we can see security has increased, however, danger has also increased even more.”

Santiago Sanchez, a student in our journalism class, described the traditions surrounding American football and Thanksgiving.  The students from Ecuador responded: “American football isn’t widely watched here in Ecuador; our culture revolves more around soccer, as is true in  most South American countries.”