GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH EPALS

Ця стаття була опублікована у квітневому номері Журналу «Відкритий урок» 2011 року

GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH EPALS

By Svitlana Maliy

Introduction

Over the past few years, the Internet has arisen as a prominent new technology. The influence of such a powerful technological tool has penetrated all aspects of the educational, business, and economic sectors of the world.

An outstanding American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey perfectly said, «Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.» We are in an era in which teachers and books are not the only sources of information and lectures are not the only method for delivering and acquiring knowledge. Learning in the 21st century requires critical thinking, adept use of technology, and global collaboration, and we should offer all these to our students on a regular basis. Schools and teachers must be challenged to use the tools and techniques of today, not the ones of the past.

Regardless of whether one uses the Internet or not, one must be clear about the fact that we have entered a new information age and the Internet is here to stay.

I teach English to middle and senior students in Nikopol, Ukraine. My students are 14 — 17 years old. I have been an English teacher for 15 years.

Since 2010, I have been using global collaboration as a teaching tool.

What is ePals

EPals, Inc. is the World’s Largest K-12 Learning Network. It offers K-12 schools, teachers, students and parents a safe and secure global online communications and collaboration platform for building educational communities, providing quality digital content and facilitating 21st century learning.

National Geographic and ePals are continually collaborating to create and distribute high-quality digital content to bring unique learning experiences to learners around the globe.

EPals was the first educational application dedicated to creating a school-safe online environment on the Intel-powered classmate PC.

The Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation and ePals are working together to bring high-quality content to Eduteka. org, the Foundation’s website.

Through ePals’ Spanish language portal, Bienvenido, educators and their students can connect and collaborate in Spanish.

Ideas for Getting Started with ePals

I became greatly interested in ePals Global Community™, because it is offered at no cost to classrooms.

As it turned out, it consists of more than 600,000 educators and reaches more than 25 million students and parents in 200 countries and territories.

Educators can find email-based collaborative projects with digital content from National Geographic; forums for students, teachers and families to participate in discussions with peers worldwide; classroom Match which helps educators connect with other classrooms by searching ePals profiles based on project topic, student age range, country, language and more; school-safe email for monitored communication between students and their ePals.

First of all, I signed in ePals Global Community™ and created my students’ accounts. EPals allows teachers to monitor student email accounts.

Monitoring enables you to preview students’ incoming and outgoing email messages; ensure that messages are appropriate to age, setting and context. In other words, it safely brings email technology into your classroom.

With the purpose of contacting classrooms, I submitted my own classroom profile: