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Celebrating World Read Aloud Day 2011, students & teachers in Connecticut read aloud with Connect To Learn scholars in rural Tanzania!

Yesterday, March 9th, marked the second anniversary of "World Read Aloud Day," a worldwide effort to raise awareness on the need for global education, and to celebrate the power of literacy.

To recognize the day, two classrooms at the New Canaan Country School in Connecticut, and two classrooms at Ilolangulu Secondary School in Tanzania, read and sang songs to each other over a Skype connection – take a look!

Jack Megrue, a student at New Canaan Country School, reads to a group of students sharing a computer at a school in Tanzania over Skype.

The Ilolangulu Secondary School just last week was connected to electricity for the first time ever thanks to the Millennium Village Project, and received their first computers. Yesterday’s event helped kickstart Connect To Learn’s School-To-School Connections program, which will connect classrooms in rural Africa to students and teachers in the developed world. As it grows, the program will help foster collaborative learning, cross-cultural understanding, and global awareness for students by enabling digital interactions through real-time chats, audio calls, video conferencing, emails, and text messaging.

We like to think of this as our 21st century pen-pal system, and what better way to kick it off than with a celebration around the power of global literacy!