Elective #1 – Communication – KeyPal

Ideas for projects and epals (all ideas are for Language Arts classes grades 6 and 7)

1. Literature Circles – Students from both my class and the online class read the same novel. All the students would be assigned to small groups. Each student has an assigned task for the daily or weekly reading assignment. Each member of the group shares their task and thoughts on the book. This promotes an open discussion about the content of the book along with using higher level thinking skills to find the author’s purpose, theme of the novel, and the conflict and resolution. All elements of a story will be discussed.
2. Interviews – Students will create a questionnaire for their epal. They will interview the epal and then write a biography about them. They will publish the biography and share it with their epal.
3. Author Interviews—Students can pick an author to interview. They will create a questionnaire for the interview. After the interview has been conducted, the students will write an article for a class newspaper.
4. Peer edits – Students can send a paper that they wrote in class to their epal for editing. This can also be done as a whole class to class project. This will reinforce editing skills and rewriting. I think that if the suggested changes come from an epal, students will be more likely to take the revisions seriously than if it comes from their teachers. The final drafts can be put together and published as a book and sent to the other class as a gift.
5. Book Recommendations – Students can write and receive book recommendations from their epals or whole classes. This will create a high interest level in novels from different cultures and areas of the world. The recommendations can be written different ways. The students could write them like a movie review, book report, or even put a powerpoint together.

Easy to use sites

1. KeyPals Club http://www.teaching.com/index.cfm

This link will take you to their homepage for information on KeyPals Club and registration. I found this site very user friendly. Once registered and logged on the kids can easily navigate the site to find epals. They are asked to specify age, gender, location, and special interests of their desired epal. Once the list of kids that match the specified profile comes up, all you have to do is click on the child’s name and their personal information appears. Then they can click on “send letter” to compose and send an initial letter. If you are looking for a class project, you click on “find a class of keypals” and then you can specify grade, class size, location, and special interests to find a suitable class. I typed in that I wanted to find a class to discuss novels and was given a list of about 20 classes that had the same interests. I found that this was the easiest website to navigate. My students in middle school would be able to use this site without much instruction.

2. Kidlink http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/index.html

This link takes you to the teacher page for Kidlink. This website has a wealth of information. There are long lists of class projects, kids that are looking for epals, and helpful hints on how to navigate their website. Kidlink features chat rooms, class projects, and support groups along with numerous creative outlets for kids. Some class projects that I found interesting were “Making Our World Better”, “Dream Job”, and “Helping Children Cope with Disaster and Lose”. “Making Our World Better” is a place where children work to decide what they want the world to be like in the future. This promotes conscious thinking. I think it is a great idea!! “Dream Job” is a collaborative effort to find out about a specific career that the child is interested in pursuing. While working with others that have the same career interest, they research the job itself. This gives the children a realistic knowledge of what is involved in that field. They also investigate ways to better themselves so that they will be a highly qualified candidate for a position in the future. I truly believe that it is important for students in middle school to start looking into career options. This is a great motivator for higher education. “Helping Children Cope with Disaster and Lose” is a place where children can express their emotions through art. At this time, there are drawings from children posted on the site that are dealing with the recent tsunami. I think this is somewhere where children will feel comfortable showing their feelings because they can see that they are not alone.

As far as class projects are concerned, there are 2 ways to participate through this site. One is to join a class project that is already going. The other is to start your own class projects and invite others to join. All you have to do is go to the “Teaching and Learning” link under the “Learning to Use” category and then click on the “Find another class for joint projects” link. From there you follow the directions to either find a project already going or to create your own project.

This website can look intimidating, so kids would need some instructional help at first but once they get going they should be able to handle it on their own. This site is not as user friendly as KeyPals but it is full of information and valuable projects.