Elise, Mich. — Students in Algiers, Algeria gathered in a classroom Tuesday for an experience of a lifetime.

With some wearing green and white MSU T-shirts sent by the university, students of Cheikh Bouamama High School awaited a video conference call from students from a Junior Achievement class at Ovid-Elsie High School in Elsie, Mich.

The class, taught by business department teacher Bonnie Ott, aims to educate and update students on international relations and global business.

The call, a result of the Partnership Schools Program, or PSP and MSU's College of Education, was designed for 11th- and 12th-grade students from both schools to share cultural and technological similarities and differences. The program is the first education project between Algeria and the United States.

"They are a lot more like us than I thought," said Alex McClure, an 11th-grader at Ovid-Elsie. "They like the same music and food as we do, and they dress similar."

Students from both schools designed PowerPoint presentations, compiling digital photos and creating questions for their counterparts to view electronically - all in an attempt to learn about each other's cultures and communities.

After they viewed the information, they had the opportunity to respond to each other through an Internet Web portal. E3Link (English, Education, Electronically Linked), provides each country with the technology to learn about a global society and serves as an online model for the exchange of information.

The meeting was originally planned as a one-hour video conference where each group of students would be able to see and hear the other group.

Because of a technical glitch, however, students at Ovid-Elsie were only able to hear students at Cheikh Bouamama High School while the students in Algeria were able to see and hear everything.

Joseph Codde, MSU educational technology professor and director of the PSP program, who is in Algeria this week, helped facilitate the conference.

"The students reported they've found they have many things in common with students at Ovid-Elsie and having an opportunity to see and speak with Ovid-Elsie students reinforced this idea," he said.

Codde was joined by U.S. Ambassador to Algeria Robert Stephen Ford.

In Elsie, education professor Rhonda Egidio, who has worked closely with the program, said the purpose is to open the students' eyes about similarities and to help Algerian students learn English.

"My highest hopes is that this experience becomes part of their makeup and identity," Egidio said. "As a young person, before prejudices become locked, they have an experience from someone in another country that they're open to learn about. I think they'll realize they are citizens of their country but also global citizens. I think they'll just see that connectedness."

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Brighton, who recently visited Algeria to help build better relations with the country, joined the students at Ovid-Elsie for the conference. While in Algeria, Rogers had an opportunity to visit Cheikh Bouamama High School after hearing of MSU's involvement.

"What you find, at that age, is that everybody is willing and open to understand each other and tear down barriers of mistrust and other things," he said.

During the conference, students shared what they had learned from each other over the past few months. An Algerian girl said she learned the students at Ovid-Elsie have many similarities, especially with sports and music.

"It was fun," said McClure. "But we also learned a lot and became less sheltered because we were seeing how other people live."