A couple of years ago I set up skype call between my Year 9 History class and a school in Turkey to discuss the Gallipoli campaign in World War One. My students were blown away by the Turkish students’ descriptions of the conditions on the Turkish homefront during the war. “Why isn’t that in our textbook?”, they wanted to know.

This year I advertised a similar project on ‘Skype for Educators’ and sent a message out on Twitter. In next to no time I had three Turkish schools eager to work with my class. A primary class researched Attaturk and translated their research into English for my class. Then, to avoid the 9 hours time difference, we decided that the best way for two Turkish high school classes to communicate with us was via video. My class prepared a video introducing themselves and asking some historical questions. The Turkish students did the same in response.

My students exhibited a growing awareness that Australia had attacked a foreign country and the Turkish soldiers had fought bravely defending their homeland. In fact, my students became quite concerned about what the Turkish people might think of them today. This sparked a powerful exchange where the Turkish students explained to my students the role of imperialism and the place of Australian colonial troops in relation to British power at the time. The classes were learning not from, but with each other.

“When the peasants learned to read, the kings began to look stupid.”