ePals Where Learners Connect: An Involvement of Classmates Around the World

Students today are not restricted to collaborating with the students physically beside them in the classroom, they are also given the opportunity to communicate with other students around the world! They can do this through the involvement of projects and activities that other students across the world are participating in. How is this possible?  A recent global community that I have explored, ePals, allows this interaction to effectively take place through their website which is safe, secure, easy to use, and manageable for educators. You are able to manage what children see, whom they speak with, and what they can post. 

Educators across the globe can add their project onto the ePals site to share and collaborate with other classrooms. You are able to read the objectives of the activity, the procedures they completed with their students, pictures of student's work, and the outcomes at the end of the project. Similar to blogging, you are able to filter through projects with tags to find an appropriate lesson to fit the needs of your students. A specific project I read was titled, Collective Detective Story and featured a 'Teacher in the Spotlight'. The following information about the activity was listed as such:

Description:

Students learned the concept of writing a short narrative detective story with twists and turns in collaboration with their foreign friends. The project motivated and engaged students in reading stories in the crime fiction genre. They used logical thinking and reasoning skills to brainstorm the future of their composition. They also learned about the culture of another country and gained an understanding of another countries' education system. .

Outcomes:

1. Students will compose a short narrative story.

2. Students will practice Netiquette skills.

3. Students will create a Wiki page.

4. Students will learn about the culture of another country.

5. Students will develop skills in recognizing relationships.

6. Students will make comparisons and inferences as well as reflect and interpret reading between the lines.

This description allowed me to quickly determine if this was something I would like to use in my future classroom. The format of each project on the site allows for educators to collaborate with other classrooms because of the detailed description and outcomes listed. 
As a future educator, I am excited to see that there are other opportunities for me to involve my students with not only through textbooks. I will be able to now rely on technology to share and reflect the activities I create for my own classroom, collaborate my students with classrooms around the world, and have a solid foundation of networking with other teachers. The more cultural involvement for me as an L2 educator, the better. This website has much more to offer than projects and collaboration.  It has a resource section for teachers that are also filtered through tags. I highly recommend visiting this site and signing up!