Web 2.0 Resources to Promote Cross-Cultural Awareness and Connections
ePals, a Cricket Media product, is a fantastic web 2.0 tool that allows classrooms to partner up in a fun and safe way. ePals enables educators to match up their classrooms for projects or other learning experiences easily and quickly. Educators must first be approved by ePals before they can start connecting with other classrooms. Students are assigned their own email addresses through ePals, which ensures safety and identity protection.
With its own Global Citizens Learning Center, ePals is one of the top tools for encouraging global education and connections in your classroom. It’s easy and free to sign up, and relatively simple to start searching for partners and projects. Upon exploring this tool, I was a little overwhelmed by what it offers. Not only can it be used for connecting classrooms, but it has different articles, activities, games, quizzes, discussions, and more. For me, some of this seems a bit superfluous, considering its ability to match classrooms and projects is already phenomenal. ePals is quite the comprehensive web 2.0 tool for global education and beyond.
Had I known about this tool when I was a Spanish teacher, I would have used it to connect my students with Spanish speaking classes looking to learn English. What an amazing exchange of information that would have been! Now that I am a technology integration specialist, I would like to take a look at the projects and see if anyone is looking to discuss and create projects around Digital Citizenship. Creating these projects would also aid students in their digital literacy skills, since we could create anything from slides presentations to video PSAs. I would love for my students to collaborate on a digital citizenship PSA with others from around to world to show that being kind online is something that students from all over the globe have in common.