ePals Projects

    ePals is an education online media, which offers a platform for both teachers and students to build or join in the educational communities. Major purposes of this site are to provide quality digital content and facilitate collaboration for effective learning. One of the attracting sections of ePals is its projects.

       Teachers are able to create their own projects and let students who are interested in the projects to join in. Almost all the projects are authentic, meaningful and can be finished in teamwork. For example, one teacher creates a project to help her students to have a chance to communicate with other people who are from India, Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China because what students currently learned is the ancient cultures of those countries. What the teacher is interested in having her students compare the modern day culture with the old ones. Finally, the project will be present in the form of Powerpoint.

       If you want to join in a project, ePals is also convenient to help you find the one that you might interested in. You can search the projects based on the language, region, projects types, and so on.

       There are also some featured projects which might have higher requirements and more interesting. One of featured projects is CollaborativeDetective Story. The students have to work together to composes the paragraph of a collaborative detective story. Students can e-mail each other and brainstorm together to determine what is going to happen next. The exchange continues until the story ends. Native speakers can read and proofread, making any grammatical/spelling corrections needed.

       This inspires me that ePals can be used as another tool to teach storytelling through internet besides Animoto and GoAnimate. But I think detective story is hard for most of the intermediate students, I would like to change the genre into fairy tale. As the teacher and instructor, I can provide the first sentence and correct students’ grammar. Each of the students will have a chance to make contributions to compose the story by providing at least one complete sentence. I can also offer a brief lecture about what elements should be involved in fairy tales before they start writing.

       To sum up, ePals is helpful to promote meaningful teaching and learning by using technology strategically. Moreover, collaborative learning is another “selling point” of ePals to attract more people to join in the projects together. Collaboration is also an important skill in both language learning and social interaction.