Language Opens Doors. Stories Should Be Shared.

Our Mission: We believe that personal connections across cultures ignite a passion for learning language. We connect young people studying each others' languages in order to launch them on a path toward global leadership.

How we do it

Stories Shared partners classrooms in Panama and the United States, and helps them record short videos about their life and home. Classrooms are paired for a full semester, and over the course of months spent sending and receiving videos, students get to know each other across borders. Parts of the videos are recorded in the students' target language, and other parts are recorded in their native language, giving each classroom the chance to both use the language they are learning, and hear it spoken by native-speakers their own age. Stories Shared supports teachers by providing lessons for recording the videos as well as viewing the videos from their partner classroom in class. 

The idea behind Stories Shared is that language learning is easier and more engaging for students when it is done in a way that connects them with people their own age who speak the language they are learning. This is why study abroad programs have been so successful in language acquisition. Stories Shared develops lesson plans to capture the fun, engaging, everyday life conversations and topics that connect students in a natural way, mimicking the informal relationships built when students go abroad. In August 2015 a classroom on a small island in the United States met a classroom in the interior of Panama. Check out what happened here.