The ePals update

Breaking done ePals

ePals website:  (highlighted important areas for those of you who don’t have time to extrapolate the importance)

The World's Largest K-12 Learning Network

ePals, Inc. offers K-12 schools, teachers, students and parents a safe and secure global online communications and collaboration platform for building educational communities, providing quality digital content and facilitating 21^st century learning. The world's largest K-12 learning network, ePals Global Community™ consists of more than 600,000 educators and reaches more than 25 million students and parents in 200 countries and territories.

The global scale of ePals' network offers teachers, students and parents unprecedented ability to facilitate teaching and student learning by sharing projects and best practices, connecting with other classrooms and learners around the corner and around the globe, and accessing content and lesson plans designed for an increasingly digital and networked world. With an estimated 500 million students online at school and/or at home, the ePals learning network is transforming education by offering teachers and students a true combination of standards-based content with tools for authentic learning. Students are learning in a real-world setting that builds digital literacy skills, improves critical thinking and introduces students to multiple points-of-view.

The important parts from this are:

1.      Safe and secure environment staged for student learning

2.      Collaborative effort for learning: projects and techniques

3.      Ability to merge classrooms from around the world (culture requirements for standards)

4.      Pre-developed lesson plans   

The most useful parts

Partnered with companies like:

           
           

               

Features:

·         ePals LearningSpace™:

virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content

·         ePals Global Community™: (free)

can access the community to find collaborative projects, join discussions in the community forums, and search thousands of classroom profiles to engage with others in authentic exchanges

·         ePals SchoolMail®: (free)

email for students in grades K-12

·         In2Books:  

e-mentoring program for students in grades 3 through 5, matches students with adult pen pals, who read the same books, and exchange teacher-monitored, online letters about questions and issues raised by the text

·         ePals Distributed Learning Platform:

offers organizations the opportunity to leverage the network of ePals' federated communities through sponsorships or platform licensing

You don’t have to take my word for it:

ePals creator, Nina Zolt, explains the importance of looking at learner-centered activity

Epals Tutorial 2 by Ellen Burns

Hill City Brings the World to Their Classroom with ePals

Hill City Elementary School in Kansas was able to use ePals global community to bring the world to their students who are from a small rural community.

Epals Commentary

Motivate students through an effective tool

            Message for epals

Once there was penpals (wiki / website) and now there is epals

A word of caution:

I too was exposed to perils of penpals in high school.  The majority of the time exposed and used was very limited and the writing was predominately in my native language.  However, I should say that not all of the writing to my penpals where limited because my wife was a my penfriend from Turkey.  

How will I use this tool in my classroom:

I would use the ‘Classroom Connect’ feature in my classroom to connect my students (in Turkey) with native speakers in other countries.  I would personally try to connect my students’ with native speakers in England and America.  I personally would use England as the dominate source for native exposure seeing there is a higher exposure to English people then there is Americans. 

In using this resource for such and activity I will allow for my students to become culturally exposed to other forms of English along with being able to practice using English in a natural setting.

With proper monitoring eventually the time the ‘Classroom Connect’ can become a classroom voice chat.  Voice chatting will give my students a great exposure to English and will give them plenty of talk time in the target language.