ePals Global Community

I have never heard of this site before but am now so thankful that we have been introduced to it. I was happy to see that National Geographic has partnered with ePals (it lends some credibility for me). One important point for me is that this website appears to make connecting with other classes across the globe painless. In the past, I have tried to find credible sites where my students could online penpal with Spanish students who wanted to help them practice. Without having experience in this capacity, I had a hard time locating willing parties. This is one perk that I have noticed in a preliminary investigation into the ePals site.

I would definitely use this site to help me connect with Spanish speaking students so that our classes could practice written and spoken language, along with learning about the two cultures. Also, I found a really helpful area of this website where they feature a teacher and his/her usage of the site for inspiration. Roanne Parra's class (Spain) has collaborated with another class in Venezuela. I loved their idea: they have included a video of their final project which was a project where the students shared their daily routines. Since this is a topic that is commonly taught in my beginning classes (and the students sometimes have difficulties expressing that they do something at a particular time), I would love to use this project. I like that students would be able to include cultural information about their daily routines (for example, instead of drawing themselves during their daily routines, they could take real pictures of their items (so that students could see products from the target culture)and they could demonstrate the use of a 24 hour clock.

I also really like the share your work tab. I love to collaborate with my colleagues to maybe inspire them or get constructive feedback from them.