ePals and Global Collaboration

ePals is a web community that focuses on projects that are open for collaboration and have far-reaching implications. They use a common forum format to allow multiple threads within the project topics. There are resources for teachers and students alike, which help with the collaborative process, and provide a jumping-off point for research on the project topics. When someone starts a thread within a project, they can connect with other classrooms elsewhere in the world, and students can connect with other students to share ideas, develop concepts, solve problems, and collaborate on projects.

Some of the projects focus on sharing culture, thus promoting tolerance and understanding in an ever-shrinking world. These projects include focuses on holidays and festivals throughout the world, storytelling in different cultures, and why we are who we are. Other projects include maps, weather, global warming, and natural disasters, which are all topics that affect everyone around the world in different ways.

I would surely be able to use this site to help connect my future EFL classes with kids back here in America. I would pick a project that pertains to the vocabulary or theme of the current chapter, and have the two classes provide their own culture's input into the problem solving portion of the project. The project would culminate in each class presenting a powerpoint or video recoding to the other class and showing what they learned and how they learned from each other.