ePals

When going through the course materials about using the net to communicate with others, I looked further into two different tools. The two tools which I looked into were uStream and ePals. Both of these tools take two means of communicating via the internet and look to improve or enhance how information can be exchanged. I believe that both could fill a niche within classroom interactions. I will focus on my findings in ePals (my assignment was focused on uStream).

                              Picture take by Halcyon Styn: link

I found that ePals features a specific tool which I think could be exciting. When I was a young student, I tried participating in a project called Flat Stanley. The idea of Flat Stanley was that her was a paper thin boy who could travel via mail. You would send Flat Stanley to someone in a far off place, to someone across the world, where he would "travel"and bring back souvenirs from his travels. This was very exciting to me, it was a pen-pal-esque experience, in which I would communicate with someone from across the continent. Unfortunately for me It was a long and tedious project in which you had to wait for the mail system to exchange information. Children would receive their packages and different times; others, like me would not receive a letter back at all. Nonetheless the idea was exciting for me. Using ePals, a teacher can post an add (of sorts) explaining a collaborative project that his/her class wants to participate in. Other teachers from across the world can see these ads and contact you via the service of ePals. Using ePals, which also is an email service provider that is geared for educators and their students, you can communicate back and forth with classrooms from all over the world. ePals even features a translator for email (which is pretty spiffy). Teachers could even moderate/monitor their students' email activity if they chose to. It overall seemed like a decent service.

When first thinking about communicating with peers, I thought of only communication through classmates. I think that students could be more interested in educational topics if they were also communicating with international peers on educational subjects. Through tools like ePals, the education community can become a global community.

ePals website: http://www.epals.com/