Sunday, April 24, 2011

Epals -- Making Your Classroom Unlimited

    Epals is a really useful website, which provides an excellent platform to connects teachers, students, parents and educators from around the world, enabling them to communicate and collaborate on academic and cultural projects and establish international friendships.
   When I entered Epals, what impressed me most was that it could help teachers to find a program all over the world. And what educators need to do is just clicking on one of the regions in a map of that area, and then finding on any country to see a list of potential ePals learning partners in that country. From this way, teachers could search the program which is suitable for their teaching in the world. So as far as I'm concerned, I would like to use use this function in my culture class. For example, if I teach Chinese students the custom of western Christmas, I would search some western countries to find the similar program, and let students use their English communicate with native speakers to know more information about Christmas. Through this kind of communication, not only students can improve their English, but also they would get the first-hand information to know how local people celebrate Christmas. 
    Besides searching for global classroom, I would like to find the projects which have the similar topic with me. For instance, if my topic is weather, I will search some related projects about weather. I want to know how other teachers teach students using this topic, and then improving my class. I believe I can benefit a lot from this kind of learning.
    In a word, Epals let me know what global village is.  

1 comment:

Maryanne said...

Your ideas for connecting your students in the "global village" sound like they would be very motivating.