Epals seems like a pretty neat place. It offers a variety of tools connecting classrooms around the world. It creates what they call a "Global Community" allowing schools and districts to connect in an online community.
The Learning Space is much like a wiki insofar that it provides a single site of access for students, teachers, administrators, teachers, whoever, to collaborate on a project or work. What makes Learning Space really neat is the ability to include a particular school or district enrolled in ePals.
SchoolMail is a safe, secure alternative to pen pal projects commonly used in the K-12 environment. It allows students the opportunity to communicate with other students from schools all over the world, also connected to the ePals community. The tool offers a variety multilingual communication solutions; including instant language translations.
In2Books is kind of cool. It enrolls children in a sort of mentoring program which connects them to adults who share reading habits and interests. This is another neat alternative to the traditional pen pal system. The tool is completely monitorable by teachers to ensure the students safety.
Hi, Nick, Thanks for the great comments on ePals!
ReplyDelete* Did you see that student work can be posted on ePals for a worldwide viewing audience? Look at the Student Media Gallery. For EFL students, this is a great way to see other students speaking English (and some other languages) and see other places, many of them in English-speaking countries. My favorite is the children who live in rural New Zealand talking about the sheep farms in their very British English! (English doesn't sound the same everywhere.)
* EFL students can read the questions and answers that other students write. Because students don't write as complicated text as adults do...it's easier for young learners to read. (So much of what's written on the internet requires ability to process complex language structure.) Students can read all the questions/answers without a signon. For them to write a question or answer one, their teacher has to register them.
* Projects on ePals such as "The Way We Are" allow students to practice English with other students, while writing about things they know...their school, their family, what they do for fun, etc. These are free too.
* An EFL-teacher created project is featured in the ePals Ambassadors. Rawya is an EFL teacher, grades 1-2, in Lebanon. She pairs her students with students in gr. 2 in Colorado. Read about them at: http://www.epals.com/media/p/234620.aspx
You can also see a three-minute video of them and see examples of student work that demonstrate learning.
These two teachers were also the North American winners of the Microsoft Innovative Educator program last summer!
* LearningSpace integrates multiple web 2.0 tools into one platform with private access. That means a teacher can turn on or off blogs, wikis, forums, email, etc. with a couple of clicks. Teachers need to register their student once and then can select which tool is best for a particular activity. If two teachers are collaborating, they can quickly create a new "supergroup" of the two classrooms and turn on/off whichever tools they want for that group. All this is in a safe and protected private location, so people can't just search on the internet and find it. Students can store work, including videos, in a digital locker. A teacher can embed a video in a blog and ask for students to write responses. So much power is available in this amazing product!
* The International Baccalaureate licensed LearningSpace to use with their middle and high school students and all their teachers starting this fall. See a three-minute video: http://bit.ly/IBvideo
Good luck with your studies, and it will be great to have someone who is really knowledgeable about good tech uses in student learning joining the ranks of teachers!
Rita Oates, Ph.D.
VP, Education Markets, ePals
Here's a short video from Rawya's class on Nov. 8, 2010: http://youngclovers.blogspot.com/2010/11/saying-hi-to-epals-around-world.html
ReplyDeleteI thought you might enjoy seeing ESL students from an Arabic-speaking classroom!
- Rita Oates, ePals
Nick,
ReplyDeleteI participate in the In2Books program as a mentor and am very pleased with how it is run. It provides a safe exchange of letters between an assigned elementary grade student and a (background checked) adult who read the books chosen by the student. It is really well organized and offers many supports for the adults who volunteer to participate.
Dr. Burgos