Global Learning: This could be for you

The ePals website was a lot of fun to explore, two of it's features - in2Books and SchoolBlog - really grabbed my attention though.

The SchoolBlog feature seems like a great answer to the safety and accessibility issues that often arise when educators attempt to use blogs in the classroom. It provides classroom only and parents only access, search capabilities to easily sort though past posts and material, multimedia hosting ability, as well as calendar and survey tools. I think the best way to incorporate this tool into the classroom is to have it set up at the start of the school year and use it as an outline for what the rest of the school year holds. There can be sections for different texts, discussion boards for students to respond to one another, a FAQ section for parents and contact information for the students and school. All handouts could be posted on the blog so students can easily keep up-to-date with lessons if they are out of class. Blogs are definitely not a passing fad in education so I think it's important we embrace them, as meaningful and responsibly as possible.

As an English teacher, how could I not focus on the in2books feature? With this feature, students are matched up with adult pen-pals that they "meet" by writing introductory get to know you letters. Students study five different genres (realistic fiction, social studies, biography, folklore, science) and read one book from each of those genres. The students then discuss the book with their pen-pal while learning about it in their own classroom. I absolutely love this idea. It would be so much fun to have students reading a canonical text (like Shakespeare) and have the opportunity to communicate their thoughts and opinions and learn more about the text from an adult (who they've had time to get to know) perspective. The teacher could assign the same questions to the students and the pen pals and see how their answers match-up or differ, it then provides the opportunity for learning to take place on both sides. It also gives the students the chance to feel like an "expert" and they're opinion is being heard and understood. It could be an extremely empowering experience for students.