Monday, April 25, 2011

ePals - A Twitter Alernative?

To me, ePals seems to be an alternative to the most exciting features of Twitter.  This is another great method of communicating with parents, and bringing them into greater contact with what is happening in the classroom.

ePals has a number of features that I think are great for this purpose.  It has calendars that can be updated with upcoming school activities, assignments, and assessments.  It also has options for posting comments and allowing parents to connect with the teacher and question them.

I think that parent involvement is crucial in any child's education, so naturally the methods of connecting with a parent excite me.  However, there a number of other features that make ePals great for students as well.

ePals offers connectivity for students across distance to expand one's classroom anywhere the internet can reach.  This may mean learning about alaska and then connecting with a classroom there for students to ask their peers in alaska questions.  Or, it may mean learning spanish, then connecting with a classroom in a spanish-speaking country to practice the language with spanish-speaking peers.  Allowing for this actual contact makes what students are learning real and relevant, and therefore much more memorable.

Additionally, there is a literacy aspect to the programs offered by ePals that I find interesting.  I feel that I would need to explore the topic more to know if it were right for my students, but as an ELL teacher, I think that it's possible that this could be a wonderful addition to the focus on literacy that would exist in my classroom.

As has seemed to happen every week in this course, I feel that I have just been exposed to another method that not only can make my teaching more exciting and relevant, but can also make my teaching more of a community effort.  After all, it doesn't just take a village to raise a child, it takes one to educate him too...