The idea of the Scrapbooking project came after having worked with iEARN's Teddy Bear Project. Its objective was to provide a similar experience of cross-cultural exchange between two groups of teenagers, since older students would consider childish carrying a teddy bear home. The first step was to find a teacher/partner from a different country that had a group of students with the same English level (intermediate) and similar ages. A blog with the project guidelines was set and its link was sent to email lists to invite teachers to join.  After a short search, a teacher from Argentina seemed to be the perfect match. Brazil and Argentina have a highly competitive sports rivalry between their national football teams, as well as between their fans. This old football rivalry is also know as 'The Battle of the South Americans', so working with a group from Argentina during 2006 FIFA World Cup was a great opportunity to dispel myths between the two countries.

            The Brazilian and the Argentinean teacher exchanged emails to adjust the tasks and schedule according to both classes interests and needs. The two classes agreed to work for two months personalizing pages of a scrapbook that should be sent to each other by postal mail before the end of the school term. The students' task was to customize the scrapbook pages with pictures, poems, lyrics, stories or anything that illustrated their lifestyles, preferences and culture. Meanwhile, the students got to know one another by interacting on a blog (blog with the project guidelines) where they posted photos, introductory messages, questions and even videos of  TV commercials that were popular in their countries.

            After a couple of months, each class received a parcel with the scrapbook and other gifts by postal mail. Opening the parcel and finally touching their virtual friends' scrapbook was surely the highlight moment for both classes. Each student had a chance to take the scrapbook home, read it carefully and share the gift with other friends and relatives. Later on, both teachers conducted a survey to find out the students' impressions about the exchange and for most of them it was their first time interacting in English with teenagers from a different country. Both teachers feel that students have learned that the two countries have more similarities than differences.

Links to the evaluation survey results:

Results of the survey in Brazil: http://erikacruvinel.googlepages.com/home

Results of the Survey in Argentina: http://erikacruvinel.googlepages.com/survey_argentina

 Web 2.0 Highlight: Since the final goal was to exchange two scrapbooks by postal mail, and students would only see the concrete result in the end of the term, exchanging messages, photos and videos in a blog throughout the project was extremely important to keep students inspired and motivated during the whole process.

           An online variation of the scrapbook project can be done with Bubbleshare (http://www.bubbleshare.com/), a very user-friendly website that allows users to upload photos and create virtual albums. The fun part of it is that students can add captions, cliparts and even audio to narrate each photo. Students could work together creating albums on different topics related to their cultures and share their creations with their new friends online. Another advantage of using Bubbleshare instead of creating paper scrapbooks is that the costs to produce and send an album online are very low or non-existent compared to the scrapbook sent via postal mail.