Karen Rainier

SLM 521

Elective #9

ePALS

E-Pals: Connecting Your Students With Students Around the Globe Through Email

Email can be a great tool to use to help students connect with students of other cultures and with other classrooms thousands of miles away! At the early childhood level, this is a great way to get students excited about writing and communicating. It is also a great introduction to internet safety and e-mail usage.

To begin, teachers should access the following website: ePALS

ePALS is my choice for getting connected because it is highly monitored and filtered and safe for classroom use. You choose froma list of over 200 countries to link to your students. It is also easy to navigate and gives you lots of different kinds of opportunities to interact with other students and classrooms.

Teachers should click on the tab for the tour or go directly to the tab entitled “Classroom Match”, which gives instructions on how to log on and select an appropriate classroom to link to your class via email.

Once you have successfully linked your students to students in another country, you will need to decide on the type of activities and interactions you want to create or establish. The link below provides some great instructional ideas about incorporating email into the classroom:

Email In The Classroom-This website gives teachers the chance to search for project ideas by subject or grade level. (It also gives links to ways to find keypals, however, sadly, since the website has not been recently updated, most of the links are unavailable or do not work.)

Here are a list of instructional ideas I have compiled which I think are a great start for a 1^st-3^rd grade level:

1. Writing a Friendly Letter: Simple as this may seem, this is an imperative skill for 1^st-3^rd graders to master, and email is the perfect forum for them to practice. This activity could be the introductory project to assist online epals with getting to know one another. Teachers could first do a model lesson writing to the other teacher, and discussing the parts of a necessary parts of a friendly letter that students will need to include. Then students would have the chance to practice writing a friendly letter while also getting to know their new email penpal.

2. Descriptive Writing: For this activity, the students will work with their online email partner and would be participating in a descriptive writing activity where they use expressive language to describe themselves physically (specifically their facial features). Students would compose an email where they describe themselves very carefully and thoroughly to their email friend. The epal does the same. When the students receive their penpal’s descriptive paragraph describing their face, they would get a chance to draw it! If the teacher has access to a scanner, students could draw their epal by hand. If not, students could use Paint or another computer-based art program to create their friends face so they can then send their pal the picture they rendered based on the details provided.

3. Collaborative Story Writing- This is a great lesson, and this could be easily adapted for many age and ability levels. For this lesson, teachers would need to review story elements and some basic writing skills with their students prior to the email interactions.Then, tudents could decide together with their epal on a topic for a story- perhaps the teachers could provide a list of possible ideas that both students would have prior knowledge about. At this point, one student begins the story. During the class period, they would write as much as they had time for. They would then send what they wrote to their ePal. When the ePal receives the email, they then pick up with the story, building on what their friend has already written. They two students continue on until their story is “complete”. Then, if teachers want to take it a step further, they can give each student an editing “job”: ie- when they receive the email, they must be the “punctuator” and look for and correct all the punctuation mistakes. Then the next time, the other person is the “capitalizer”…etc.

4. Describe your Family and Friends or What do you do for fun?- This is another great lesson to work on paragraph writing and descriptive writing. It is also a great way to compare cultures and become more globally aware. Students could create a list of questions to ask their online buddy about their family and friends or their favorite recreational activites. Their ePal would then have to respond with a paragraph answering the questions and describing their family and friends or what they enjoy doing for fun. This is another lesson that could be easily adapted for different levels. It also ties in directly with the Carroll County Social Studies Curriculum because of the multicultural connection and the discussion about community.

5. Multicultural Mad Libs- This is a great way to begin learning about parts of speech or writing a story. Each ePAL would write a story or paragraph, but would leave out some words. Where the missing words were, they would need to place (depending on the language of the class they were connected with and the grade level) either the part of speech or the type of word: ie- animal, famous person, body part, etc. Then, they would need to make a separate document with just the blanks for the missing words and what kind of words belong in the blanks; they would send this (and only this) to their ePAL. When their ePAL receives the message, they would simply fill in the blanks as creatively as possible and send it back. Finally, they would fill in their online buddy’s answers into their story to see what kind of silly story they made together. Then they could share the final product!

6. Webcam/Video Message Read-Alouds: If teachers have this kind of technology available, it could be a wonderful tool, but you would need to make sure to check with administrators about the regulations regarding using this type of technology with students before proceeding. However, if it was possible, students could practice fluency and gain confidence reading aloud by choosing their favorite book and recording an video read-aloud to their ePAL. It would be a great way to share in the joys of reading with students across the globe!

7. Class Newsletter-In this activity, students could share current events in a newsletter format. Perhaps on a monthly basis, students could collaborate as a class and come up with the topics to include- they could be classroom, schoolwide, local or national issues…or even global! This would be a really creative way to get students to share what life is like and tell about interesting things going on in their class/school/town/city/county!