The central cohesive activity of the Teleclass International program is the use of videotelephones (LUMA PHONE) to link students throughout the world with international partner classes. This activity has proven a great success in the area of second language learning. Luma conferencing provides real language learning situations, allowing students to instantly find out if they can be understood by native speakers of the target language. This aspect gives purpose and direction to foreign language studies and brings new meaning to cross-cultural programs. With regard to other disciplines, Luma phones have helped bridge vast distances between classrooms in different geographic regions to help bring a global context for cooperative learning to all areas of the educationa l curriculum.

Communication through LUMA PHONE with black-and-white still pictures and voice is different from that through motion-color video conference as picture-story shows are different from movies. However, Lumaphone has a lot of merits. It's cheap and easy to handle. Besides schools all over the world having telephone circuit can be partner schools with it. It's light enough to own one in common among several schools. Students can concentrate on conversation due to still pictures. Partners' pictures appeared one by one on the upper part of the screen cause the peculiar tension and a sense of unity to both students. TIJ picked up necessary information from the record of Lumaphon e in the past. (school name, address, Tel/fax, contact teacher, address for E-mail, etc.) We made the long-awaited of 189 schools having Lumaphone in the world .

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