Cathy Healy will use her experience as a newspaper reporter, novelist, magazine and Intranet editor to collaborate with Digital Vision fellows to help make their projects a reality. For nearly 17 years, she was at National Geographic; prior to that, she was the editor of Americas magazine published by the Organization of American States.

She took early retirement from Geographic to come to Stanford and scale a six-year project with Brazilian public-school English teachers whose students are building fluency and global leadership skills by participating in P2P online collaborative projects through iEARN, a network of one million students in 115 countries, doing projects in 30+ languages.

Brazilians need to pass English, Spanish or French exams to enter a university and by 2010, they will need Spanish to graduate from secondary school. However, because of Brazil's size and economic clout, many Brazilians, and especially those in public schools, seldom, if ever, hear the language they are studying. Thus, it’s hard for language teachers to build fluency and harder still to build motivation.

Studies show that online collaborations can increase reading-writing-speaking-listening skills in a foreign language by as much as 20%.

Cathy’s partner, Profa. Almerinda Garibaldi MSc, teaches in the Centro de Interescolar de Lingas de Taguatinga, which has led the introduction of collaborative projects in the Federal District of Brasilia. CILT is one of eight, publicly-funded Centros in DF; they teach English, Spanish and French to 32,000 students in grades 5 to 12.