The China Songs Project

Fall, 2006. I was a student in Lan Li's Instructional Technology class at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. We were assigned a multimedia project for which we were to create a website about ourselves and our American culture, to be viewed by high school students at Taiyuan #2 Foreign Language School in Shanxi, China. Part of our project was to create an assignment for the Chinese students to complete.

The purpose of the project was to understand how technology can be used in the classroom to narrow gaps between oceans, create a multi-cultural environment, encourage creativity and deepen our understanding of our planet and those we share it with, whether across town or on the next continent.

I chose to do my project on music, a language everyone on Planet Earth understands.

I didn't know at the time that this little class project would turn into something bigger than myself--that I would collaborate to make beautiful music with extremely talented young people I had never met, or that I would find a co-conspirator, co-creator and good friend in Giff Searls, the teacher in China for whose students this project was developed.

And I certainly learned my lesson about using technology in the classroom to build relationships, to understand ourselves and the power we hold to change the world, if even in a small way, if even for a day.

On the next pages, you will find the Website I created for the students (which I recently re-designed for the sake of aesthetics.) I assigned them the task of writing a song in English. A month or so later, Giff Searls mailed me a large packet of over one hundred songs, from which I chose six to put to music.

Without further ado, I present to you the China Songs Project.

If you’ve already been through the pages for the students and would like to go directly to the finished project, click here.