Exploring the ePals

The website I'm going to introduce today is called ePals Global Community. ePals provides collaborative technology to help the schools, teachers and learners to connect with each other. It gives students the chances to learn under a intercultural context, working along with peers from other parts of the world. In other words, the students are learning within an authentic context. For the schools and teachers, ePals can be a chance for them to look for cooperation, or opportunity to exchange educational ideas, or even friends.

With the help of ePals, teachers can set up a project which provides the students with opportunities to research on a topic with peers from other places and culture. Students can email their peers, exchanging information and ideas with each other. From my point of view, on one hand, it is a GREAT environment for the students to learn because the input is quite comprehensive in this situation; on the other hand, when the students, especially those ESL/EFL students, are working on the projects, they are practicing their language skills at the same time. This is the feature I like most about ePals. In the future, I would love to use it in my classroom. I will try to choose a intercultural topic (holidays, etc), and encourage my students to communicate with voices from all over the world (introducing each other about their favorite holidays and making friends). I believe it will be a good chance for them to learn.

Another feature I love is the virtual field trip series. In this section, there are a lot of video clips introducing different places. The several clips I checked out are all made by the students themselves, and they are so cute! I feel like I'm there with all those lovely students. It's amazing because probably you cannot go there by yourself, but with the help of this feature, you get the chance to see the world from another perspective. Vice versa, I'd like to encourage my students to make videos themselves to introduce their hometown. I think they will like it. Also I am thinking 

This clip was made by the students from Ola School, Idaho USA.

Picture retrieved from: http://www.epals.com/blogs/film_festival/archive/2009/04/15/earth-day-film-festival.aspx